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