On 16/10/06, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
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.
There are lots of contents that could (and should) be free, but is still under copyright. Some are in the hands of museums and archives, some in publishers, some in government agencies.
I think it would be a mistake to start pouring money into such institutions, which should instead be forced (by a change of copyright law or national policy) or encouraged to give it away. We'd run out of money much too soon, and we'd build expectations that old collections can bring profits.
Give this man a prize. It's happening already, though not with copyright per se.
A specific example: In the UK, the various county record offices have a large number of deposits - papers that are held, catalogued, curated and made available by them, but with the ownership kept private, and handled as a long-term indefinite loan, anything from photograph archives to manorial tax records. Every now and again, someone withdraws one of these to sell it - you can get a goodish amount from an American university, usually - and they're faced with the dilemma of letting it go or trying to match the price offered.
By squeezing the pips you can usually get enough together to keep it. Unfortunately, the first problem is that other depositors then say "Cor, they got two million for that stuff? I'm taking mine to the States too!", cue exodus of everything else - and potential depositors start asking tricky questions like "Why should I leave this stuff with you when I could just sell it to someone outright?"
(University archives aren't immune to this, but tend to mostly have purchases, gifts and bequests rather than on-loan material...)
Probably the most efficient use of your money would be to bribe enough people to pass a law fixing the orphan-work problem, but I don't think that's an appropriate answer ;-)