[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Mon Oct 23 10:30:15 UTC 2006

David Gerard wrote:
> On 23/10/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have
>> achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of
>> traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language
>> domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a
>> lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a
>> better return on investment from what we do for other languages and
>> cultures.
>> The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of
>> money that are spend on English language content in the first place.
>>     
>
>
> The reason for changing the laws first in the US is because they tend
> to pressure the rest of the world into 'harmonising' with their
> copyright laws.
>
>
> - d.
Hoi,
Spending all this money on changing the law in the USA is imho largely a 
waste of money. There are so many productive things that can be done 
with it. There is so much content that is need of preservation. Things 
that are not available in any US repository. There is so much even in US 
repositories that is NOT English that needs preservation..

The Wikimedia Foundation is about content. By doing what we do best, the 
creation of content and making this content available, we make the 
business model of proprietary knowledge more and more problematic. By 
becoming an ever important factor for the availability of knowledge, our 
position will be such that we will have as a consequence increased 
influence on the politics behing copy right. Combine this with the 
growing realisation that science is hampered by the effects of copyright 
the momentum is ours anyway.

If there was one situation where I would agree that some action was 
warranted, it would be when the USA decides the copyright period yet 
again. This would be a good moment to move the Wikimedia Foundation to a 
more benign country. Being realistic however, it would have more 
symbolic meaning than actual effect given what American judges to 
organisations that are clearly outside their jurisdiction like in the 
Spamhouse case.

Thanks,
     GerardM