The point is: suppose someone wanted to buy $100,000,000 of existing copyrighted material and set it free. What should it be?
Geographical data!
Right now there os only a very limited amount of free geodata available. The US is a positive example, but in Europe most of the data to generate useful maps is copyrighted and sold to companies like TeleAtlas.
Geographical data would allow the creation of a free atlas, which could be linked to already geocoded Wikipedia content. With upcoming devices such as cameras and mobile phones readily equipped with GPS receivers, a Wikipedia "location based service" makes more and more sense.
The companies which make a living licensing this geodata (who's aquisition is mostly paid for with tax money by the way) will certainly oppose a complete buyout. But it is a real shame that not even a dataset with up to date high resolution country borders is available and maintained (correct me if I'm wrong). So this plus regional borders and major roads would be a good starting point. And would make projects like (shameless plug: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen/WikiMiniAtlas ) more useful.
Daniel