My own thoughts on this, which I also expressed on the meta page:
1. There is plenty of material out that that is already public domain. Part
of the problem is that it can take forever and a day to digitize it all. In
the case of books and magazines, digitization often involves destroying the
hard copies in the process. There are, however, specialized scanners that can do
the work without ruining the books themselves. These are expensive (about US
$30,000 a machine). Ten machines, strategically located around the world,
along with student staff to operate them around the clock could help to
preserve these texts and store them for prosperity. Additional people (paid and
volunteer) will be needed to OCR, proof, and hyperlink the material to ensure
that it doesn't get lost in a glut of material (I have visions of the final
scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark was finally stored in some crate
in an army warehouse).
2. While OCR capacities exist for some languages, they do not exist for
other languages, where the material is much more likely to get lost. Manuscripts
in Tibetan monasteries, for example, can be scanend but not OCRed easily. To
make this information available, developers should be paid to create adequate
OCR tools for these languages. Rough cost: $5 million.
3. Music has been recorded around the world for well over a century, yet
many of the early recordings are being lost, especially those on wax cylinders
and porcelain records. Preservation includes locating, identifying, and
remastering. People must be trained to do this. Rough cost: $35 million over two
years.
4. This is true of old films as well. Celluloid copies are extremely rare
and extremely flammable. Restoration is exceedingly costly. For example, [[Theda
Bara]] is a well-known vamp of early Hollywood (the word "vamp" was first
used to describe her), yet none of her films survive, and they were made less
than a hundred years ago. Films are international, they include important
historic documents such as newsreels, and they are being lost every day. Today,
most preservation work is being done by major studios, since it is so costly.
In other words, they are taking important works now in the public domain,
restoring them, and contending that the restoration is an original work, i.e.,
another hundred years at least until some Vigo or Charlie Chaplin films enter
the public domain ... and little attention is being paid to newsreels of
events like the Russian revolution, World War I, etc. Like music, people should
be offered scholarships to learn the art of film restoration and work on these
projects. Until this happens it can be outsourced. Rough cost: $50 million.
5. To ensure all of this remains accessible, we will need a LOT of servers
and bandwidth: Initial outlay: $10 million.
Total $100 million dollars, spent over 5 years. Costs include staffing,
identifying prospective targets, transportation, overhead, etc. Just coordinating
a project of this scope will take a lot of effort.
And there is competition too. As an example,
_http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/_ (
http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/)
is a collection of
Internation Women's Journals, some of which are very important historically.
They are already scanned, but they are inaccessible because a private
company has (rightfully or wrongfully) copyrighted the scans.
Lots to be done. You will see how quickly $100 million can be spent.
Danny
In a message dated 10/15/2006 11:27:57 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
jwales(a)wikia.com writes:
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
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