On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
--Jimbo
Buy next to nothing. The wikiway.
Liberate publishers from the burden of having to maintain their backlists, and replace annual book discount selling extravaganzas with a great great great grand jubilee of manuscript manumission.
Get likeminded people from the copyleft community together to organize it. Print gaudy red stickers to put on remainder books sold at these events, whose rights are simultaneously released. For the authors several types of headgear with the events logo, (think fez, baseball cap, tourban, phrygian cap; whatever people have worn throughout the ages as a symbol of "libre") and little emblems you can add onto them (pins, forgetme-nots, poppies, rosettes, ribbons) for a given number of liberated manuscripts by the author of the works and their publisher conjointly.
This would simultaneously raise conciousness about libre content, and allow the former keepers of copyright the goodwill and free advertisement value that they generally do not get nearly in the same degree from just holding book discounts.
Am I dreaming too big?