Roger Luethi wrote:
On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 16:13:36 -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Well the point is not an unrestricted gift, though that is fun to think about too. The point is not political lobbying, though that is fun to think about too. :-)
The point is: suppose someone wanted to buy $100,000,000 of existing copyrighted material and set it free. What should it be?
Dreaming a little to the tune of $100,000,000 but with restrictions is hard, especially knowing that there is a real possibility that such a project may do more harm than good.
But here is my restriction-compliant dream:
I wonder if content acquired within the restrictions you mentioned (pick any of the good suggestions made by others) could be used as a lever in some dual-licensing scheme (as used by several major open source software companies). As long as the content is under a free license but not in the public domain (e.g. GFDL or CC-BY-SA), we'd have a bargaining chip that we could parlay into access to other works. -- We can't do that for Wikipedia itself (because there is no single copyright owner), but if we owned a significant piece of desirable content, things might be different.
Roger
Also something I have not seen on this thread yet, which this comes close to, is the lobbying power of this having a significant positive impact. Wikipedia itself is a powerful example of what good open can do and politicians and voters do notice.
With that in mind I think the textbook suggestions or the language learning suggestions are among the best. It also works better for the donor to be able to see "look what impact this $100 million had". Quite aside from the good press for the donor it also leads directly to thinking about how the commons is a good thing, a good thing that laws should be more friendly towards.
SKL