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.
http://blog.anthere.org/
Anthere