[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Tue Oct 31 22:48:11 UTC 2006

On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
> --Jimbo

Buy next to nothing. The wikiway.

Liberate publishers from the burden of having to maintain their
backlists, and replace annual book discount selling extravaganzas with
a great great great grand jubilee of manuscript manumission.

Get likeminded people from the copyleft community together to organize
it. Print gaudy red stickers to put on remainder books sold at these
events, whose rights are simultaneously released. For the authors
several types of headgear with the events logo, (think fez, baseball
cap, tourban, phrygian cap; whatever people have worn throughout the
ages as a symbol of "libre") and little emblems you can add onto them
(pins, forgetme-nots, poppies, rosettes, ribbons) for a given number
of liberated manuscripts by the author of the works and their
publisher conjointly.

This would simultaneously raise conciousness about libre content, and
allow the former keepers of copyright the goodwill and free
advertisement value that they generally do not get nearly in the same
degree from just holding book discounts.

Am I dreaming too big?

-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]