[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Mon Oct 16 18:58:14 UTC 2006

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 14:08:52 -0400, Maury Markowitz wrote:
> >$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.

Actually, that seems more like a measly third of their market cap. Even
iStockphoto went for $50 million. And that's only images.

How about buying out the major scientific publishers and their copyright on
our primary sources? $100 million are at least an order of magnitude short
of what it would take to buy only one of Thomson, Reed Elsevier, or
Springer Science.

Yes, drop in the bucket describes it pretty well.

> 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.

That's not a problem you solve by buying stuff for $100 millon.

> 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.

No, alternatives exist. And in many cases, people even know about those
alternatives but don't use them.

> 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 

Libraries are prime offenders in locking up content that is not even under
copyright anymore. And in many cases, companies want control even more than
they want exposure.

> 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.

I very much agree that education is an important issue. But curators and
librarians have often a vested interest in keeping their stuff locked up,
and if they don't, their bosses do. A pamphlet won't change their behavior,
that would at least take some intense discussions and in many cases some
additional force/incentives.

Roger