[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

[ScottL]

Roger Luethi wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 18:00:05 -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>> 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.
>> Now you're talking!  Can we explore this more?  Is there a 
>> sustainability model here?  Can we use $X to leverage the 
>> content-freedom of $10X worth of good stuff?
> 
> I believe so -- it's certainly worth a shot. I will sketch out the reasons
> below.
> 
> A little introduction to dual-licensing, because I noticed some confusion
> elsewhere in this thread: some open source companies (e.g. Trolltech and
> MySQL) give their software away under a copyleft license (e.g. GNU GPL).
> The software is free to use, modify, and distribute as long as all
> derivative works remain under that license (that's essentially what
> copyleft means). Some users of the software, however, would like to
> distribute proprietary derivates, and they pay real money for the privilege
> of getting to use the very same code under a traditional, proprietary
> license.
> 
> In a nutshell, dual-licensing is about offering products gratis to those
> agreeing to share alike and having those in the proprietary business pay
> for their use.
> 
> The only area with fairly solid evidence on this form of dual-licensing is
> software, and that's a different industry with a distinct set of
> attributes. The key for us would be a good idea of derivative works and
> copyleft licenses as they apply to text, images, or any other content we
> might own.
> 
> Basically, the question boils down to this: do we have to give the new
> content into the public domain, or can we use a free but copyleft license?
> And what do the copyleft restrictions _really_ mean for the type of content
> we acquire? (the latter question preferably answered by some experienced
> lawyers)
> 
> So why hasn't this been done before, besides software? -- I suspect that
> there aren't many content owners a) willing to use their property to
> enlarge the commons and b) large enough themselves to get noticed.
> Wikipedia (available only under a copyleft license) could have been one of
> very few candidates if it wasn't for the fact that dual-licensing requires
> a single entity that can negotiate on behalf of all copyright owners.
> 
> Your $100 million dream machine could create the critical mass in one go.
> To prospective creators of derivative works we could offer free use if they
> are willing to share alike. For proprietary derivative works, we could
> negotiate payment in cash or in works that _they_ would put under a free
> license in return.
> 
> Roger

   Would something like this not require that the $100 Million worth of 
copyrights in this case be assigned to WMF or some other foundation that 
we setup rather than simply released under GFDL or a CC license?

   Further, if we end up creating some sort of copyright holding 
foundation, might it also be worthwhile to make it easy for contributers 
to assign their copyrights to WMF if they desire?  This is I think only 
interesting in a dual-licensing type of setup, or am I missing something?

SKL