On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 18:00:05 -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
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.
Now you're talking! Can we explore this more? Is there a
sustainability model here? Can we use $X to leverage the
content-freedom of $10X worth of good stuff?
I believe so -- it's certainly worth a shot. I will sketch out the reasons
below.
A little introduction to dual-licensing, because I noticed some confusion
elsewhere in this thread: some open source companies (e.g. Trolltech and
MySQL) give their software away under a copyleft license (e.g. GNU GPL).
The software is free to use, modify, and distribute as long as all
derivative works remain under that license (that's essentially what
copyleft means). Some users of the software, however, would like to
distribute proprietary derivates, and they pay real money for the privilege
of getting to use the very same code under a traditional, proprietary
license.
In a nutshell, dual-licensing is about offering products gratis to those
agreeing to share alike and having those in the proprietary business pay
for their use.
The only area with fairly solid evidence on this form of dual-licensing is
software, and that's a different industry with a distinct set of
attributes. The key for us would be a good idea of derivative works and
copyleft licenses as they apply to text, images, or any other content we
might own.
Basically, the question boils down to this: do we have to give the new
content into the public domain, or can we use a free but copyleft license?
And what do the copyleft restrictions _really_ mean for the type of content
we acquire? (the latter question preferably answered by some experienced
lawyers)
So why hasn't this been done before, besides software? -- I suspect that
there aren't many content owners a) willing to use their property to
enlarge the commons and b) large enough themselves to get noticed.
Wikipedia (available only under a copyleft license) could have been one of
very few candidates if it wasn't for the fact that dual-licensing requires
a single entity that can negotiate on behalf of all copyright owners.
Your $100 million dream machine could create the critical mass in one go.
To prospective creators of derivative works we could offer free use if they
are willing to share alike. For proprietary derivative works, we could
negotiate payment in cash or in works that _they_ would put under a free
license in return.
Roger