[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

[Roger Luethi]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 16:13:36 -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Well the point is not an unrestricted gift, though that is fun to think 
> about too.  The point is not political lobbying, though that is fun to 
> think about too. :-)
> 
> The point is: suppose someone wanted to buy $100,000,000 of existing 
> copyrighted material and set it free.  What should it be?

Dreaming a little to the tune of $100,000,000 but with restrictions is
hard, especially knowing that there is a real possibility that such a
project may do more harm than good.

But here is my restriction-compliant dream:

I wonder if content acquired within the restrictions you mentioned (pick
any of the good suggestions made by others) could be used as a lever in
some dual-licensing scheme (as used by several major open source software
companies). As long as the content is under a free license but not in the
public domain (e.g. GFDL or CC-BY-SA), we'd have a bargaining chip that we
could parlay into access to other works. -- We can't do that for Wikipedia
itself (because there is no single copyright owner), but if we owned a
significant piece of desirable content, things might be different.

Roger