This is one of the more interesting IP initiatives I've heard of, even simply as an intellectual exercise. Even better if it actually happens. I'll add two suggestions to the wish list. First a purely selfish plea for content lost: the Voyager Company catalog of electronic media. This is almost a recursive request since several Voyager titles were themselves exercises in freeing legacy works. I'll lose access to the titles on my shelf whenever Apple ceases support for OS-9. Some, like "With Open Eyes", are great works by the standards of any medium. Presumably there are many other publishers from the early, perhaps pre-internet, days of electronic media whose historically significant content is at risk. A more revolutionary suggestion is to open up the technical standards process. Many international standards are proprietary, such as ISO-8601 that any of you who were engaged in Y2K remediation efforts must surely be familiar with. Familiar with, but perhaps have never seen a copy of, because they charge real bucks. Another example just from the area of timekeeping is ITU-R TF.460-6. What is this you say? The internationally recognized (e.g., by our State Dept.) definition of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC underlies standard civil time throughout the world. Here is a theater-of-the- absurd quote from the minutes of a recent ITU meeting of their working party 7A: "After the introduction of the document the WP-7A counsellor informed WP-7A that a preliminary document i.e. the PDRR, could not be circulated beyond WP-7A according to ITU-R resolutions nor could the currently in effect Recommendation ITU-R TF.460-6, be attached to the SRG report with an explanation of proposed changes since all ITU-R Recommendations are only sold by the ITU-R." To give you a sense of the kind of service opening this standard up would provide, the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) is debating removing any connection between UTC (i.e., the time on your wall, your wrist, your cell-phone and your laptop) and the motion of the Sun in the sky, by eliminating leap seconds. Small in the short term. World-changing in the long term. Vast number of other standards documents that underlie the infrastructure of the modern world are similarly protected behind proprietary walls. I recall a piece from the early days of Wired magazine describing one noble soul's fruitless efforts to convince ISO to loosen their proprietary policies. Actually, there is a third suggestion – buy up the rights to back issues of Wired and other "popular" journals, not just the academic literature. Anybody who has tried to navigate wired.com to find their rare precious nuggets would thank you! Rob Seaman National Optical Astronomy Observatory