[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Mon Oct 23 13:52:00 UTC 2006

>Spending all this money on changing the law in the USA is imho largely a
>waste of money.

And resources. I contribute to the Wiki to help provide an alternative to 
the marketingspeak and lawyer-writen short-term memory that forms a 
surprising amount of the 'web. Political lobbying is the sort of thing I 
come to the wiki to avoid.

I still think everyone is much too focused on "big content". I'm much more 
concerned about the huge amount of non-commercial content that gets stamped 
with a copyright without the author having any idea of how that works. I 
have posted on this before, and the answers were always "well that's what CC 
is for". True as that may be, no-one's ever heard of it. _I_ never heard of 
it until coming to the wiki.

Consider the millions of snapshots that are taken every week and posted on 
the 'net. One or two of them would improve the wiki, I'm sure, but we can't 
use them. Not because the snapshot-taker has any intension of making money, 
but because it was copyrighted "by default" and they are completely unaware 
of it. This has happened to me repeatedly when trying to get images for 
articles. And contrary to the claims here, most librarians and archivists 
are completely unaware of either the problem or the solutions.

So I still think education would be a good use of these funds. Who cares 
about the big media houses when there is so much content out there that's 
free but shackled? Let's try to fix THAT problem, lets make sure people know 
there is a better way.

Maury

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