I'd like to free up as many language learning materials as possible, it's rather stupid that people can't talk to fellow human beings because they don't have the money to learn the language. OK, so there's Wikibooks, but we could do so much better. I'd like complete learning solutions rather than just reading stuff from the net.

Andrew Archer

On 15/10/06, Berto albertoserra@ukr.net wrote:

Hi!

...

• Many schools suffer from expensive and often substandard teaching

materials. Bringing the best that money can buy into Free resources

would

...

help create a generation that grew up with Free content, technology

and the

...

associated paradigms.

I'd really start from here. Make it free, make it good, then start to translate it and deliver it all over the planet. And make 100% sure it's not all "made in the west". Colonies are over, it's time we start to teach our kids something from other countries, too. Just think of a basic planet wide art and literature course...

Bèrto

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Hoi, The question posed by Jimmy was what would we do with $100.000.000,- given that there might be someone who could make such a sum available. It is for the FSF to do what it does, it is for us to do our thing. I am not someone that only dreams..

Time is money. Now that the war against communism has finished it is ironic that projects like ours are very much by communities that thrive because it is shown that there is a lot of time available for the public good. There is also a lot of money available that can be used for the public good. This is demonstrated really well in GNU/Linux; it really took off after IBM invested it's billion $ in what is arguably the biggest success of the FSF.

Crucial is to have ideals and make them work. It is like this parable of the talents..

Thanks, GerardM

Frederick "FN" Noronha wrote:

GerardM, Money need not be the determining factor in determing what is achieved. When the Free Software Foundation (and allies) went about building a workable free software model, they didn't think money. By reverting the logic of the game, so smartly, they've created an 'alternative' which is possibly better than the 'real thing' (assuming the dominant Microsoft system is that).

Wonder what are the levers of change here? Maybe dreaming about things is a start... FN

On 15/10/06, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hoi, ONE HUNDRED MILLION US.. Hmm, that is not even one US$ per person....

GerardM wrote:

What needs doing:

• Much information needs to be preserved. Much data that is really

precious needs digitizing. So that we will nor suffer another disaster like the burning of the library of Alexandria.

It happens all the time. The earliest US patent records were lost because of a patent office fire in the 1830's. The introduction of cheap wood pulp papers in the 1830s led to self-destructing documents. The 1890 US census records were lost because of a fire. The records office in Dublin was destroyed during the struggle for independence. The 1960 US census became almost unreadable because it was kept on IBM punch cards. Early information relating to space information is difficult to use because it was stored on large magnetic disks with a fraction of the storage space of a modern CD. Besides obsolete formats, there is the strong risk of magnetic degradation. Then there's the toll from human activity like the looting of the Baghdad museum when Iraq was invaded, or ancient manuscripts that were used to wrap food in other middle eastern marketplaces. At least one complete Bach Oratorio was among the things lost during allied bombings of Germany during World War II.

Redundancy is likely a key to the preservation of heritage. Having more places hold copies of the information greatly reduces the risk of having them completely lost to catastrophic events. Such projects are not cost-effective for businesses whose cost-recovery depends on skimming the top of the most popular products. Governments are too inclined to so wrap such projects in bureaucracy that it's a wonder that anything is ever accomplished. Perhaps all governments need to be convinced through stark risk analyses that the best survival chance for a lot of priceless information is a mass popular effort at digitization and distribution.

• Many schools suffer from expensive and often substandard teaching

materials. Bringing the best that money can buy into Free resources would help create a generation that grew up with Free content, technology and the associated paradigms.

This will take more than just materials. It will also take teachers with the capacity to cope with massive amounts of information, teachers who are able to guide their students into the information treasure room without having them go mad with riches.

• Our infra structure is really cheap. It is outrageously successfull

in what it does but as more people start to depend on it and as more functionality / data gets connected, it becomes more fragile. It would be good to remain as cost effective but we do need more giants like Brion, Tim, Mark, Domas ..

If we are going to run on a shoestring it should be long enough to be tied.

Ec

On 10/15/06, Lawrence Lo lorenzarius@gmail.com wrote:

Academic journals, thousands of them. If free access to all knowledge is our goal, freeing the journals is a major step towards there. I don't know what Open access or Wikiversity might impact the process of knowledge generation in the future, but I know the academy was/is the most important part in the process. Though I wonder if a million dollars is enough :P

Another thing I have in mind, albeit maybe off-topic, is the digitization public domain works. Not only text (which is what Project Gutenberg is doing), but books, documents, photos, paintings, pictures, recordings etc. Forget about copyrighted stuff, there are a lot of goodies without copyright but I can't access them simply because I am not sitting next to them.

--Lorenzarius

I second this. There are plenty of journals which are slipping into obscurity, ne'er digitized or summarized elsewhere, and slowly being microfilmed or simply chucked out by librarians, but which are still in the public domain. Even just scans of them without any OCR work would be tremendously useful (for Distributed Proofreaders to take care of later, for example).

If that isn't feasible, it would be awesome to buy up the estates of certain scientists and other thinkers. For example, James Joyce, or Alan Turing, or Kurt Godel - their estates are half in the public domain already (actually, I think the first publication of Ulysses may already be in the public domain), and would be invaluable for Wikisource and related articles.

--Gwern

The priority purchase in the sciences is very clear: I/ The standard modern enclyclopedias and other refereneces works: Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of chemistry and chemical technology, Walker's Mammals of the World, Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, and so on. Most, but not quite all, are already available in digital format. Some, such as ELS, do not actually make a profit. Almost all are esigned for the advancedd undergraduate level. The difficulty would not be that of acquiring them, but of keeping them up to date.

II/ The news content of Nature and Science. these do make quite a profit, though.

III/ Scientific American tho perhaps a little below our level, it is exceptionally well and consistently edited/rewritten, and has had major financial difficulties in the past.

IV/ Such journals as Physics today Chemical and engineeering news, and the equivalents.

V/ Some of the major review and current awareness journals: Accounts of Chemical Research, Nature reviews in, etc. These are very up to date, and while some of the content is of the graduate level, much should be accessible. I wouldn't suggest getting them all. I would suggest instead selective licensing of content.

But I am not sure it would necessarily be the best approach to incorporate the material here, rather than to make the publications themselves open access.

Perhaps our role would then be as an index, and our database consist of pointers.

maybe not Annual review of []

Probably about

On 10/15/06, ScottL scott@mu.org wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.

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.

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.

--Jimbo

Someone may have suggested this below in the thread, I have only read about half of it. But, I thought I would throw it in anyway. According to our article on the topic Encyclopædia Britannica started losing sales and value in the company around 1990 and then sold for 135 million in 1996. All print encyclopedias seem to be doing less well than in the past for obvious reasons. I think this might make them open to the ideas of selling the copyrights (not the companies) to earlier versions. The 1911 Britannica has been pretty useful to the project I suspect that older editions of a number of print encyclopedias might also be useful.

SKL _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

On 10/15/06, ScottL scott@mu.org wrote:

Someone may have suggested this below in the thread, I have only read about half of it. But, I thought I would throw it in anyway. According to our article on the topic Encyclopædia Britannica started losing sales and value in the company around 1990 and then sold for 135 million in 1996. All print encyclopedias seem to be doing less well than in the past for obvious reasons. I think this might make them open to the ideas of selling the copyrights (not the companies) to earlier versions. The 1911 Britannica has been pretty useful to the project I suspect that older editions of a number of print encyclopedias might also be useful.

SKL

I tend to agree, but I don't think we should go for *general* encyclopedias. I mean, I did a little work on the Missing Encyclopedic Articles project, and my general impression was strongly (from comparing our articles to EB's, for example) that the benefit from assimilating another generalist encyclopedia would not be worth all that much - certainly not anywhere near what a live publisher would demand. (Britannica for instance would probably demand on principle an exorbitant sum). Now, a defunct generalist encyclopedia might be worthwhile.

But I think specialist encyclopedias are much more worthwhile: they go under all the time and so hopefully will give better bang for the buck, and there are many many specialist encyclopedias with better coverage of their area than any Wikipedia. For example, the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (perhaps this is not the best example since it is still active last I heard), or more antiquely, the Suda or Pseudo-Apolodorus's Bibliotheca.

--Gwern

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 01:19:05 +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:

There are lots of contents that could (and should) be free, but is still under copyright. Some are in the hands of museums and archives, some in publishers, some in government agencies.

Many works are not even under copyright but locked up anyway.

I think it would be a mistake to start pouring money into such institutions, which should instead be forced (by a change of copyright law or national policy) or encouraged to give it away. We'd run out of money much too soon, and we'd build expectations that old collections can bring profits.

That was exactly my first thought, too. This well-intentioned idea has a great potential of being worse than useless by putting our long-term goals further out of reach.

$100 million might be enough to make our lobbying efforts in Brussels and Washington DC more effective for a decade or more. Large scale grass-roots campaigns like the one over software patents in Europe succeed every now and then as a one-time effort, but they are limited in their perseverance against vested interests that have a lot more patience and money.

Unfortunately, lobbying is not as sexy as giving money to free a bunch of pictures or texts. An alternative would be to carefully select and support projects that don't create new, bad incentives. Project Gutenberg might be a candidate.

Roger

Andrew Gray wrote:

A specific example: In the UK, the various county record offices have a large number of deposits - papers that are held, catalogued, curated and made available by them, but with the ownership kept private, and handled as a long-term indefinite loan, anything from photograph archives to manorial tax records. Every now and again, someone withdraws one of these to sell it - you can get a goodish amount from an American university, usually - and they're faced with the dilemma of letting it go or trying to match the price offered.

By squeezing the pips you can usually get enough together to keep it. Unfortunately, the first problem is that other depositors then say "Cor, they got two million for that stuff? I'm taking mine to the States too!", cue exodus of everything else - and potential depositors start asking tricky questions like "Why should I leave this stuff with you when I could just sell it to someone outright?"

I don't think we want to get into bidding wars for this kind of material, and I don't think it will be necessary. The LDS Church has certainly be effective in microfilming large amounts of local records for genealogical purposes. My feeling is that many of these archives are overwhelmed by the huge quantities involved, and can have major headaches simply storing it all. Many have difficulties doing even a rough index of what they have. They would probably welcome the help if they are confident that the archive will be kept safe and if restrictive covenants connected with some items are respected.

Ec

I think we should also focus on works from the last 30 years and put some energy behind a copyright reform effort to get even older content liberated by legal means.

I'm sorry, but I believe this will have no measurable effect on the wiki.

In opposition to any effort this $100 million could possibly generate, the entire media industry is arrayed with a variety of well established lobby groups to ensure no such change takes place. It is resonable to suspect that the only changes to the law will be to increase the length of time for protections, while at the same time removing existing user rights.

I know its sad, but if you think that this money could change worldwide law that would end up having any real effect for the wiki, well, dream on. I understand your concerns about giving money to rich people, but let me assure you that it is precisely these people that would panic and dump (insert any sum here) into any effort to oppose such reform.

Meanwhile that same amount of money could liberate a huge variety of media that would immediately be available for use. Such examples would make the media holders happy, not mad, and could cause other media asset libraries to be put up for sale as well.

Maury

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 09:43:05 -0400, Maury Markowitz wrote:

...

I think we should also focus on works from the last 30 years and put some energy behind a copyright reform effort to get even older content liberated by legal means.

I'm sorry, but I believe this will have no measurable effect on the wiki.

In opposition to any effort this $100 million could possibly generate, the entire media industry is arrayed with a variety of well established lobby groups to ensure no such change takes place.

That comparison is misleading. The real comparison is with the money "our" side is spending now. The battle over software patents in Europe showed that the better arguments have a fair chance of winning against monied interests if you can get your arguments heard. And there's no shortage of good arguments in this case.

If you want to win against special interests, you need to drag them and their flimsy out into public view. Doing that takes a lot of time and money, but it doesn't take more money than they can afford to spend.

It is resonable to suspect that the only changes to the law will be to increase the length of time for protections, while at the same time removing existing user rights.

Possibly. And if we don't do anything, that is exactly what will happen.

Meanwhile that same amount of money could liberate a huge variety of media that would immediately be available for use. Such examples would make the

$100 million is a drop in the bucket as far as copyrights are concerned. Whatever you can buy will be a tiny fraction of what was stolen from the public each time copyright durations got extended retroactively.

media holders happy, not mad, and could cause other media asset libraries to be put up for sale as well.

Pretty much everything is for sale _right_now_, if you can afford it.

Roger

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:19:13 -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:

Right. So one of the things I am hearing loud and clear is that our community would generally like to see more money spent on lobbying efforts for copyright reform. That is a point very well taken.

It is not so much about copyright reform as it is about investing money rather than spending it, and this is a rare opportunity to talk about that.

Another example, unrelated to copyright reform: Wikipedia editors need access to primary sources, particularly academic journals. The fate of current ventures in Open Access journals largely determines whether most potential Wikipedia editors will have easy access to the sources they need in the years to come, and funding for these journals (or lack thereof) will be a major factor.

However, our task at the moment is not to dream about _that_ per se, but rather to dream about what kinds of work under existing copyright, we would like to see made free. There have been many good suggestions, and

I agree. All I ask is that if such a decision is ever taken, consider very carefully not only the value of the information you are setting free, but also the message you are sending to content owners/producers and other key players.

Roger

On 10/16/06, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote:

Another example, unrelated to copyright reform: Wikipedia editors need access to primary sources, particularly academic journals. The fate of current ventures in Open Access journals largely determines whether most potential Wikipedia editors will have easy access to the sources they need in the years to come, and funding for these journals (or lack thereof) will be a major factor.

Oh, very good.

That brings up a whole host of other related ideas...

1) Would a fraction of the money going to subsidize operations of journals, to make it viable for them to go Open Access, make sense? Form a WikiMedia subsidiary open journal foundation to do that?

2) Completely separately; WMF purchasing "institutional subscription" primary source electronic subscriptions to appropriate journals and conference proceedings in the humanities and sciences, the equivalent to what libraries get for universities etc. Would probably require establishing some level of threshold for access to them - buying an institutional subscription now doesn't let you give it away free to everyone in the world, but journals might go for it if say the threshold was "any Wikipedia editor with 1,000 plus edits".

That's not going to completely open the material, but does get it available as a common reference pool by active editors.

Till Westermayer wrote:

On the "dream" thread: putting 100.000.000 $ as stock in a foundation will result in 1.000.000 $ or something per year to spend -- why not use it that way?

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?

--Jimbo

Till Westermayer wrote:

For the visionary minded: combine both, set up a foundation with the goal to "free" copyrighted material (for wikipedia and others), give it $ 100,000,000 so it can use $ 1,000,000 every year from now on for buying copyrights. Of course that's not the same impact as spending $ 100M at once, but it would be a far more sustainable approach to change the way copyright works and do something good for a long time.

Without agreeing that it's the way to go, in this vision we could do better than a 1% return on investment. ;-)

Ec

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

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

On 10/17/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:

There's anecdotal evidence for this happening for images. The Wikimedia enquiry address gets a lot of requests to discuss licensing for an image, generally assuming we're the copyright holder (but sometimes asking directly for the author); money is certainly in the air on some occasions, though I suspect most end up as "Sure, use it, can you put my name on the flyleaf?"

Um. I've made a non-trivial amount of money relicensing my images to folks who found them via Wikimedia projects... not enough to pay for my equipment yet, but within a few years perhaps. ... but I'm just one person with only a few commercially interesting images.

I certainly would believe that a large high-quality GFDLed collection could generate real income by charging for releases under licenses which are more comforting and standard to various industries. I doubt that the income would be enough to offset the substantial cost of digitizing and collecting such works.

On 10/17/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:

On 17/10/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

...

Um. I've made a non-trivial amount of money relicensing my images to folks who found them via Wikimedia projects... not enough to pay for my equipment yet, but within a few years perhaps. ... but I'm just one person with only a few commercially interesting images.

Really? That's even better than I assumed... I was assuming it wasn't much more than paying for an occasional lunch for our regular image-creators.

People who have no intention to pay well don't bother contacting people for license grants... people who do intend to pay well have already scoured the normal stock photo libraries and have failed to find any images that meet their needs. ... Soooo....

Plus, commercial stock photography isn't cheap:

Compare http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:FoxBassoon.jpg

and

http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/classes/FrameSet.aspx?s=ImageDetailSe...

You have to log in to see the prices, so I'll just paste them here: 72 dpi - 6"x10" - RGB $ 89.99 USD 300 dpi - 5"x7" - RGB $ 229.99 USD 300 dpi - 9"x12" - RGB $ 299.99 USD

My image is similar in size to their large one (and pretty clear at that size, since it was downsampled 2:1 from the capture). Their lighting and pose is a little more attractive, while mine was intended to be a bit more informative (showing all the keywork, but I got both sides)..

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 23:17:34 +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:

The GFDL should absolutely not be used for non-textual content.

Ah, I've been waiting for someone to say that. Thank you. That is the kind of information/discussion we would need to have if we were to pick a copyleft license for new content.

It wouldn't hurt clarifying these issues for upload(er)s on the WPs and commons either, by the way.

Roger

On 10/17/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

Erik, what business do you have complaining about the use of GFDL for images when Wikinews still welcomes and encourages -ND and -NC images?

The issue of NC use on Wikinews is part of a larger issue of non-free licenses in our projects. I will discuss with the Board whether such licenses should be prohibited in our projects.

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 18:03:08 -0700, ScottL wrote:

Would something like this not require that the $100 Million worth of copyrights in this case be assigned to WMF or some other foundation that we setup rather than simply released under GFDL or a CC license?

That's exactly right.

Further, if we end up creating some sort of copyright holding foundation, might it also be worthwhile to make it easy for contributers to assign their copyrights to WMF if they desire? This is I think only interesting in a dual-licensing type of setup, or am I missing something?

For the Wikipedias it's too late to be useful. For commons, why not?

Roger

Scientific papers, newspaper archives, and image archives, and music.

The logic behind the first two is that I'd like to move the stuff we use as references into the Wikimedia space.

The logic behind the second two is to extend Wikipedia etc. with material that can't simply be re-expressed.

That is, I can "de-copyright" some written fact by rewriting the same information. I can't "de-copyright" a photograph very easily.

On 16/10/06, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch 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.

I am afraid this really isn't much of a reply to your suggestion, but it leaped into my head when I read it...

If we went down the road of "buying copyrights", we'd probably end up setting up a "licensing trust", a registered charitable organisation whose sole purpose is to acquire intellectual property and license it out For The Betterment Of Humanity.

Of course, the benefit of a registered charity is that donations to it are tax-deductible - and, much to my delight, it seems that this even extends to gifts of intellectual property. So, put two and two together, and how about having them tout for donations?

"We reckon the rights to that 1953 memoir your grandfather wrote are worth maybe $250. However, that's if it gets republished, and there isn't much commercial demand for books on 1940s Minnesota state politics. But if you want to get *something* for it, you could donate the copyright to us and put it down as a tax-deductible donation of $250..."

Unfortunately, the legal burden of confirming that the person you're dealing with is, in fact, the copyright owner may be insurmountable - most "unwanted IP" will be inheritances, and figuring out who got them in the will is not always easy. But it's worth a shot.

George Herbert wrote:

This may not be all that hard, in many cases.

My late Grandfather wrote a reasonably widely used introductory general science college textbook in the 1950s, with several editions through the late 50s. There's probably no likelyhood that it could be republished now, and even if it could be I think all involved would react positively to CC-something licensing it, perhaps just outright donating it.

There had been some talk about this after my grandmother passed away a few years ago, but nobody acted on it.

Assuming that your grandfather's rights passed on to her when he died, how did she deal with it in her will? If she didn't say anything, how was the residue of her estate distributed? If she was intestate, how many children shared in the copyrights? These are the kind of questions that need to be addressed to determine who can choose what to do with the rights. If the (more than one) children inherited equally any one can grant the GFDL licence.

If your grandfather lived in the United States, and the copyright was not renewed, the work is already in the public domain.

I bet that there would be a huge net benefit to starting up and organising a donations campaign for such a trust. A website, some volunteers, a consistent donations policy, and a little legwork to get some PR out in the scientific press would go a long way.

I doubt it. More often then not grandchildren have no idea that grandfather once published a book unless there was a ton of unsold copies cluttering up the basement.

Ec

On 10/16/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:

I am afraid this really isn't much of a reply to your suggestion, but it leaped into my head when I read it...

If we went down the road of "buying copyrights", we'd probably end up setting up a "licensing trust", a registered charitable organisation whose sole purpose is to acquire intellectual property and license it out For The Betterment Of Humanity.

Of course, the benefit of a registered charity is that donations to it are tax-deductible - and, much to my delight, it seems that this even extends to gifts of intellectual property. So, put two and two together, and how about having them tout for donations?

.....

Now, I can't be the only one thinking this, but could this finally be a way to claim Wikipedia editing as a tax deduction since you are donating intellectual property ?

• Andrew Gray

--Gwern

On 10/16/06, gwern branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:

Roger, could you expand on this? I'm not following how it works. I understand that dual-licensing works for software because companies may not want to copyleft their work, and because just source code isn't actually all that useful minus maintenance and support and documentation and other things that companies like Redhat provide for money, but how does this apply to regular old content? Is the GFDL as 'viral' as the GPL in regard to modification and incorporation, and is not being GFDL valuable enough to various parties that the relevant corporations would still realize their desired sums?

I'm not roger, but...

GFDL, CC-By-SA, and the GPL (as well as many others..) are copyleft licenses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

Copyleft licenses ensure that all decedents of the copylefted work remain at least as free (but potentially no more free) as the original copylefted work.

The result is that if someone wants to make a derived work starting from a copylefted base they may not deny downstream recipients the same rights which they received.

In the future, please avoid calling the share-alike nature of copylefted works "viral": Because nothing forces you to make use of the copylefted work of others the comparison to others, and no violation to force you to open your own works (rather, a failure to option in the face of a violation of a copyleft licenses leaves you open to prosecution for copyright violation), it is inaccurate to use the derogatory term "viral" to refer to copyleft licenses.

As far as dual licensing, the GFDL and CC-By-SA are not compatible. There used to be a larger philosophical schism between the two licenses (for example, in terms of the intensity of DRM protection) but the new GFDL drafts (Esp the SFDL) substantially reduce the real incompatibility (by making unfortunate changes, such as leaving the GFDL with less DRM protection than CC licenses) .. but the gratuitous incompatibility remains and is not likely to be resolved due to an increasing disconnect between RMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman) and the creative commons (which happily endorses unfree licenses like CC-By-NC-ND which inhibit read write culture, along side acceptable free ones like CC-By-SA-1/2.0).

So long as the GFDL (or really the SFDL) is going to be functionally equal but gratuitously incompatible with CC-By-SA-2.0, the dual licensing makes sense....

Roger, could you expand on this? I'm not following how it works. I understand that dual-licensing works for software because companies may not want to copyleft their work, and because just source code isn't actually all that useful minus maintenance and support and documentation and other things that companies like Redhat provide for money, but how does this apply to regular old content? Is the GFDL as 'viral' as the GPL in regard to modification and incorporation, and is not being GFDL valuable enough to various parties that the relevant corporations would still realize their desired sums?

--Gwern

Although gmaxwell will eat me, yes. GFDL is _viral_ too. The bigger trick of GFDL and which may make some parties to still pay for it is that you need to include a copy of the GFDL (several pages). If it hasn't other license, they must contact you (and get an agreement) to use it without such terms.

David Gerard wrote:

On 17/10/06, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:

...

Although gmaxwell will eat me, yes. GFDL is _viral_ too. The bigger trick of GFDL and which may make some parties to still pay for it is that you need to include a copy of the GFDL (several pages). If it hasn't other license, they must contact you (and get an agreement) to use it without such terms.

Yes. For using images in print, the GFDL is pretty much a pretend free content license, as the terms are ridiculously onerous in practice.

Insert my favourite cartoon here:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:BD-propagande_colour_en.jpg

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

Lars Aronsson wrote:

Somebody has wasted their life, and all they have left now is a big bag of money. Poor souls! And now they want to attach the name of Wikipedia to a "big donation" in their name, as if this was something Wikipedia just couldn't do without.

I said nothing about a donation.

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

On 10/16/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

Lars Aronsson wrote:

...

Somebody has wasted their life, and all they have left now is a big bag of money. Poor souls! And now they want to attach the name of Wikipedia to a "big donation" in their name, as if this was something Wikipedia just couldn't do without.

I said nothing about a donation.

I say we pretend that it was a possible donation and that Lars' impolitic response on a public list just cost us $100 million and that we begin to tar and feather him accordingly.

:) Well, no. Lars was just speaking his mind, it is natural. I don't agree with his tone, but I suspect that he would like it even less (though I can't be sure) that someone is brainstorming about sustainable (i.e. business model, i.e. profitable) ways that the culture might be transformed from proprietary to free.

--Jimbo

Lars Aronsson wrote:

If you want to make copyrighted contents free, I think you should avoid to involve money, because Wikipedia's moral argument is far stronger than its financial assets will ever be. But is that the problem addressed here? It sounds a lot more as if the real problem is how to spend this money that somebody happens to have, while at the same time pushing the idea that copyrights are worth paying for, and thus shouldn't be given up for nothing.

The whole scheme reeks of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where so-called "money" is spent to help schools, when in fact that money is paid to Microsoft Corporation for software licenses, that the school could have for free if they used free software.

If we are going to pay anyone to buy copyrights it doesn't need to be the big copyright owners. I'm sure there are many works where the author is deceased, and the heirs who hold the copyright have no intention of republishing the work themselves. It's limited audience would not make that worthwhile. The prospect that someone would make the work available may leave these owners willing to accept a modest payment for all rights.

Ec

On 10/17/06, Dschwen lists@schwen.de wrote:

...

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.

There is far more free geographical data in existence than you might guess.

For example, in the US most local municipalities create their own coverages including high resolution orthophotography (or rather, contract for the creation of them)... In most cases the data is available for free or at a low cost, but you have to know who to ask.

The huge problem after that is the data isn't uniform.. it's not all in the same datum, nor is necessarily documented what datum its in!

The fact that there is lots of cleanup work needed isn't bad news for us: we're good at that. The fact that the cleanup requires specialized knowledge isn't good, because we've not proven ourselves good at that sort of work.

There is also the little question of software... We don't have anything for displaying this sort of data ourselves ... and version controlled collaborative editing of geodata beyond single points is an unsolved problem.

If we were going to set a budget ... I'd say for geodata we would budget for: 1) Creation of map display software like Wikimapia which pulls point data from Wikipedia. 2) Obtaining cover data (country/state outlines) and orthophotography to use as a basemap for above.

And then focus on adding good point data to our articles, vs building a comprehensive geoinformation system. I'd invision the cover data money being spent more to pay someone to track down geodata from free sources rather than buy them commercially (by all means, if we are able.. But I don't think anyone in that business will sell us their data just so we can turn around and give it away).

On 10/16/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

Till Westermayer wrote:

...

On the "dream" thread: putting 100.000.000 $ as stock in a foundation will result in 1.000.000 $ or something per year to spend -- why not use it that way?

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?

geographical data and/or images (spring to mind, several copyrighted buildings, other works of art, people not all countries have pd for their government produces works :( (and not all ppl get to meet the US president to produce pd photos)

henna

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 11:27:55 +0930, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

Right. There are journal archives around with stuff going back hundreds of years, but they claim copyright on all their materials; if we could free that which already qualifies for PD-old, it would be a major step in the right direction.

I'd rather make a $100 million bonfire than paying those who hold for ransom what is legally in the public domain already.

Roger

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 23:24:14 +0930, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

...

I'd rather make a $100 million bonfire than paying those who hold for ransom what is legally in the public domain already.

... or at least that's our position and we're sticking to it; theirs is that they're the copyright holders, and, well, they're sticking to it too.

I don't think that is their official position, because the idea that works written hundreds of years ago are still under copyright is entirely and obviously without merit (not counting special cases like Crown copyright).

Spending some money to find out *for certain* would be quite useful. No longer would they be able to say "Oh sorry we hold the copyright to that", we'd be able to point to the relevant rulings/legislation and say "Well, no you don't, hand it over". Oh, and we need to think global here.

The fact that they don't own the copyright does not mean you can make them hand anything over. It simply means they can't use copyright to keep you from distributing copies should you be able to get or make them. However, they can try and use contracts (basically some form of NDAs) instead, which is pretty much what they are doing these days.

Roger

On 10/17/06, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote: [snip]

I don't think that is their official position, because the idea that works written hundreds of years ago are still under copyright is entirely and obviously without merit (not counting special cases like Crown copyright).

Those who have experienced the cost, time, and creativity which goes into the restoring and digitizing required for a high quality reproduction do not find this position shocking.

Nor is it weakly established. Bridgeman v. Corel was a surprising outcome considering established practices, and I expect future cases will substantially restrain the expansive application of that ruling.

Instead of buying them the journals, maps and so on which are in fact PD, why don't we politely ask for them and -if denied- use the millions to *sue* them? Some clever demands could make free a great number of items which paractically are not. Note: we must make sure that they at last get free. E.g. our queryying could be to the originals to digitalize them (for web-publishing).

"gwern branwen":

*Can* we sue? My understanding was that if they sold us copies and then tried to restrict redistribution of those PD works (and no EULA or contract was signed) simply through copyright mechanisms, then we'd have some sort of legal recourse, but that we can't demand that they make the works physically available simply because they happen to be PD if they decline to have us as customers.

--Gwern

IANAL so don't trust me, but i don't think someone could force me to pay for a PD material. However they would probably ask you a fee for sending you it or having saved it for X years :-( Lawyers should be consulted.

On 17/10/06, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote:

...

... or at least that's our position and we're sticking to it; theirs is that they're the copyright holders, and, well, they're sticking to it too.

I don't think that is their official position, because the idea that works written hundreds of years ago are still under copyright is entirely and obviously without merit (not counting special cases like Crown copyright).

Minor general quibble: retaining copyright on material published hundreds of years ago is certainly likely to be legally dubious (the oldest somewhat-legally-defensible claim I can think of is stuff published ~150 years ago, and even then IIRC they lost). Material *written* hundreds of years ago and not published, however - if a collection of Elizabethan letters found in a country house, as occasionally happens, are transcribed and printed, the publisher/editor gets a copyright of twenty years or so in most jurisdictions

(This is to encourage publishing new things, and is probably the closest thing in existence to the original concept...)

It may be ethically dubious, but it's legally fine, and it's worth always remembering the distinction between dates of publication and dates of creation.

Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

Roger Luethi wrote:

...

It is not so much about copyright reform as it is about investing money

rather than spending it, and this is a rare opportunity to talk about that.

Another example, unrelated to copyright reform: Wikipedia editors need access to primary sources, particularly academic journals. The fate of current ventures in Open Access journals largely determines whether most potential Wikipedia editors will have easy access to the sources they need in the years to come, and funding for these journals (or lack thereof) will be a major factor.

Right. There are journal archives around with stuff going back hundreds of years, but they claim copyright on all their materials; if we could free that which already qualifies for PD-old, it would be a major step in the right direction.

Being copyright is not just a simple matter of claiming copyright. The old stuff is already free; it doesn't need any more freeing. The law decides, not the claimants. If it qualifies just use it.

Ec

This is thread is the top story at Slashdot at the moment: http://slashdot.org/articles/06/10/22/215238.shtml

-- Oldak Quill (oldakquill@gmail.com)

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Roger Luethi wrote:

...

That comparison is misleading. The real comparison is with the money "our" side is spending now. The battle over software patents in Europe showed that the better arguments have a fair chance of winning against monied interests if you can get your arguments heard. And there's no shortage of good arguments in this case.

Right. So one of the things I am hearing loud and clear is that our community would generally like to see more money spent on lobbying efforts for copyright reform. That is a point very well taken.

However, our task at the moment is not to dream about _that_ per se, but rather to dream about what kinds of work under existing copyright, we would like to see made free. There have been many good suggestions, and I welcome more.

Some consideration to copyright reform would clearly be worthwhile. The emphasis here should be on the doable, or on those laws that are filled with ambiguities. Urging governments to get on to the task of freeing orphan works would be a great help with no significant damage to the unknown owners. Getting more governments to put their own material in the public domain, particularly their laws would be very helpful. It seems to me that copyright claims by some governments seem to be motivated by some kind of desire to protect accuracy, or to restrict the publication of some material; financial gain is often a more limited motivation. Accurate texts are both in our and their interests. Governments also need to be made aware that having US material in the public domain while theirs isn't will make the US point of view more predominant than it would be otherwise. The other important campaign would be to oppose the expansion of database protection laws that already exist in the EU and apply even if the contents of the database are already in the public domain. I can forsee Google eventually claiming this kind of protection for its public domain material.

One area of copyright material where we could provide great service is with journals. Peter Suber and The Open Access movement is already working at freeing the more recent issues of journals, and receiving co-operation from publishers. Publishers who are amenable to the open access idea may be unwilling to make the effort to digitize back issues that may go back many decades. These publishers, who often operate on a shoestring, could be open to a mutually beneficial arrangement for keeping their old material alive. Without access to a major university library some of this material can be very difficult to find.

Ec

On 10/16/06, Maury Markowitz maury_markowitz@hotmail.com wrote: [snip]

Everyone from a librarian scanning in an old map to a company who puts a picture of their product on their own web site should be actively encouraged to release their media under one of the various non-restrictive licenses.

[snip]

Yea, such a campaign should exist.. but it'll need a really catchy name... hmm. Something which is sure to attract participants without troubling them with any thought to how free or unfree the licenses actually are...

How about "Creative Commons"?

..oh wait.. ;)

Roger Luethi wrote:

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 14:08:52 -0400, Maury Markowitz wrote:

...

...

$100 million is a drop in the bucket as far as copyrights are concerned.

Oh balogna. That would easily pay for a takeover of Jupiter Media, for instance.

Actually, that seems more like a measly third of their market cap. Even iStockphoto went for $50 million. And that's only images.

How about buying out the major scientific publishers and their copyright on our primary sources? $100 million are at least an order of magnitude short of what it would take to buy only one of Thomson, Reed Elsevier, or Springer Science.

Yes, drop in the bucket describes it pretty well.

Yes, it does describe it well if you are including every thing under copyright in the bucket. Or perhaps if you man that copyright will still exist (which seems to bug a few people). But, in terms of the significance or usefulness of what could be done with it, then I think "drop in the bucket" is excessively trivializing.

SKL

Hi folks,

* I'd like to see Wikipedia commission or acquire a complete set of world maps in SVG (this almost certainly falls under more general ideas already covered, but this is one specific detail I'd really like to see).

* Build or formalize a reliable peer-to-peer payment system to fund smaller Wikipedias. I recall a considerable amount of support around the concept of funding the smaller Wikipedias in a previous thread, but IIRC the conversation ended at "how would it be accomplished?" So, I suggest that investing in infrastructure to make this happen would be a good move. It would be a huge amount of work: negotiating international tax law, figuring out reliable payment method, preventing fraud, determining what institutions wouuld be involved, how people apply, how positions are advertised, blah blah blah.

But you did say think big ☺

Patrick Hall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Babbage

For the satellite stuff we can use NASA WorldWind, right?

The maps, I don't know of any high quality good coverage free database out there.

Brianna

On 17/10/06, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote:

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 03:49:02 -0400, Patrick Hall wrote:

...

• I'd like to see Wikipedia commission or acquire a complete set of

world maps in SVG (this almost certainly falls under more general ideas already covered, but this is one specific detail I'd really like to see).

You make me wonder what all the maps and satellite images used for Google Earth cost. That would be something worth having. But as far as I know this stuff is so expensive that a more sensible approach might be to ask: what resolution and age could we get for say $10 million? Not much, I suspect, because it's expensive enough without a right to sublicense.

Roger _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

"Roger Luethi" wrote:

The Landsat images they use are in the public domain, but I don't know if there's a place that offers them for bulk download.

If there's not, a WMF place would be a good place to start with it.

"ScottL" wrote:

Someone may have suggested this below in the thread, I have only read

about half of it. No, it wasn't

But, I thought I would throw it in anyway.

Good, be bold :-)

According to our article on the topic Encyclopædia Britannica started losing sales and value in the company around 1990 and then sold for 135 million in 1996. All print encyclopedias seem to be doing less well than in the last for obvious reasons. I think this might make them open to the ideas of selling the copyrights (not the companies) to earlier versions. The 1911 Britannica has been pretty useful to the project I suspect

that older editions of a number of print encyclopedias might also be useful.

SKL

I'd add that most languages (even big ones) don't have a free encyclopedia like it, so having one would certainly help.