Patrick Hall wrote:
Perhaps we can get going on creative new ideas for fundraising! Post your idea below: --->
What about selling printed volumes of featured articles organized by topic?
I don't really know anything about the economics of publishing... but the foundation might come out on top, no?
-Pat User:Babbage
Hiya Pat.
That's indeed a great idea. Not only to bring up money, but simply... to further disseminate knowledge ;-)
Why has not that been done yet ? Well, first because paper publishing or DVD publishing is not really our business, so we need partnerships to do that. Surely, our tiny office can not take in charge shipping books all over the world. But there is a second much more important reason: liability. As you know, our content is not (yet) perfect. One may find copyright violations, so-called defamation etc... and whilst it is easy to quickly fix an online article when a problem is reported, it is not the case for a book. As a result, the legal consequences of the Foundation being a publisher may be HUGE. We do not want to take that risk. Really not. Imagine we get sued and we have to pay 2 millions dollars for a mistatement in an paper article ?
What to do then ? Having independand publishers take that risk for us. Big companies will not do it. They also have too much to lose. But small companies are willing to risk it.
We currently have one such company in France, and hopefully this company will do DVD versions of our content.
Yet, *this* company will sell the product, so how do we get the money?
The answer is "brand licensing strategy"
The idea is to charge other companies for the right to use our brand names and trademarks in creating derivative products. Any sale of a product using our brands must come with royalties.
This strategy is of limited use as of today, but expansion is to expect. The drawbacks of this strategy are essentially the following ones. First, there are many unauthorized uses. Most of the time, they come from a misunderstanding and can be fixed simply by a discussion. Sometimes, not. Until now, we have not chosen to go legal against misuses, but at some point, we might have to do it. We'll probably will have to make a BIG example one day. But we need to choose that example carefully, and be really really efficient to win that case. All this will cost money and professional help. Either it will be done by our legal counsel, or hopefully, by a pro-bono lawyer.
Second, if we want to actually use our trademarks, we need to secure the trademarks. To REALLY secure them, and in sufficient countries. Which means additional costs in terms of securing them and to pay people to manage them.
There is no moves as of today to go against people misusing the brand. I think no one is making big fat money with our brands, so it does not appear urgent. But we definitly need to plan for this.
However, we are actually working to secure the brands. It was on the agenda of last board meeting, we decided on which brands to secure and where, in priority. Securing the brand is a TOP priority.
Hopefully, once we have strong and well protected brands, we'll be able to draw significant money from them, in particular for publishing. I believe this will be uncontroversial. For example, a DVD of the english wikipedia may be sold by the third party 10 dollars, and the third party will give us a 1 dollar royalty.
German association have been doing something similar in the past 2 years at least, and it is quite successful. I believe it is a very important direction. It can provide good money with rather little effort. We'll probably need to fight a bunch a misusers at some point in the future. We may meet come complaints if we start putting the Wikipedia logo on toilet paper, but it is likely many brand uses will be uncontroversial. And once the brands are secured, this is likely to just be easy renewal.
BUT, first step is brand securing.
Some time ago, I listed here some ideas of some directions to collect money. I hope the discussion here will help finding more ideas and deepening them.
Anthere