[Wikipedia-l] [Commons-l] Dream a little...

[Stan Shebs]

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?
>   
Scientists have a zillion valuable photographs that they're sitting on, 
either out of lack of motivation or because they hope to use it in a 
future publication, and they don't necessarily know about free 
licensing. Hire somebody to work fulltime organizing volunteers to 
contact these people, or call them personally. Place ads in professional 
journals. Possibly offer nominal payment (call them "honoraria" :-) ) in 
exchange for free licenses. Hire a couple prominent people as 
consultants to visibly offer their material and lobby their colleagues.

Also, contract for legal advice in various countries to get the real 
status of their material, such as the Philippine government situation 
discussed recently. A statute found online does not take into account 
court cases for instance, and you'd need a qualified practitioner to 
come up with the right rule for Wikimedia projects.

Stan