On 5/19/07, Yann Forget yann@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