[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

[Maury Markowitz]

>$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.

But forget that. The problem here isn't the law, or the companies in 
question -- is this really about figuring out ways to get Disney images on 
the wiki? No, the problem is that the vast majority of content one might 
want to use on the wiki is of completely unknown origin, and thus covered by 
default copyright and unable to be used.

There is a HUGE amount of media that could, and should, be distributed 
freely, but isn't because the person is unaware of the legal defaults. 
There's another very large group who look for some sort of license to put on 
their media, and are presented legalese arguments that presents the very 
first argument they find, which is the default copyright. This isn't about 
copyright, IMHO, but a lack of knowledge of the alternatives.

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. We 
should further explain why that will be of _benefit_ to them.
$100 million could fund a truly extensive campaign in educating these 
holders in the variety of licenses out there. It could, for instance, pay 
for the mailing of a pamplete to every curator, librarian, school principal, 
archivist and so forth, asking them to consider using one of the many 
suitable licenses they likely never even heard of.

Maury