[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Mon Oct 16 23:38:18 UTC 2006

On 16/10/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> 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.

I am afraid this really isn't much of a reply to your suggestion, but
it leaped into my head when I read it...

If we went down the road of "buying copyrights", we'd probably end up
setting up a "licensing trust", a registered charitable organisation
whose sole purpose is to acquire intellectual property and license it
out For The Betterment Of Humanity.

Of course, the benefit of a registered charity is that donations to it
are tax-deductible - and, much to my delight, it seems that this even
extends to gifts of intellectual property. So, put two and two
together, and how about having them tout for donations?

"We reckon the rights to that 1953 memoir your grandfather wrote are
worth maybe $250. However, that's if it gets republished, and there
isn't much commercial demand for books on 1940s Minnesota state
politics. But if you want to get *something* for it, you could donate
the copyright to us and put it down as a tax-deductible donation of
$250..."

Unfortunately, the legal burden of confirming that the person you're
dealing with is, in fact, the copyright owner may be insurmountable -
most "unwanted IP" will be inheritances, and figuring out who got them
in the will is not always easy. But it's worth a shot.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk