[Foundation-l] [announcement] new staff member in business development

[Anthony]

On 5/19/07, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Anthony a écrit :
> (...)
> > But I think the main issue has nothing to do with the IRS.  It's a
> > matter of focus.  Developing a profitable business competes with the
> > maximum production and distribution of content.  Charging maximum
> > prices for data feeds reduces the dissemination of the data.  Charging
> > licensing fees to DVD distributors raises the prices of the DVDs and
> > thus reduces the number of DVDs which are distributed.  Etc, etc (*).
>
> I think this is false, because we deal with digital and free content.
>
> It is not because you sell a datafeed to one organisation at one prize
> that you sell it to everybody at the same price. Same logic for DVDs.
>
Interesting.  I don't think that would be feasible for datafeeds
though, and I'm pretty sure it isn't feasible for DVDs.  In the case
of DVDs, if you tried to sell them to different groups for different
prices, you'd simply see people resell the DVDs (engage in arbitrage).
 I think this would happen for datafeeds as well, if they were ever
accessible to the regular public.  If I as an individual could buy an
en.wikipedia datafeed for $100/month (which would probably be more
than enough to cover WMF's actual costs), the WMF wouldn't be able to
charge companies $5000/month, because if they did I'd just step in and
resell my $100/month datafeed for much less than $5000.

And I think the WMF *should* be willing to sell unrestricted datafeeds
to *anyone* for little more than its actual costs.  This is in line
with maximizing the useful distribution of free content, which is
after all the purpose of the WMF.

Anthony