[Commons-l] Dream a little...

Sat Oct 21 21:24:23 UTC 2006

2006/10/15, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>:

> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> 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.
>

That's three times yes, although I would like to extend 'textbooks' to
'non-fiction' more general. Also I think the ideas mentioned are good in the
sense that from there speaks an (in my opinion correct) idea that even with
a few million dollars, it would be good to make savings through going after
commercially less or not viable material. This would be a situation where
quantity beats quality.

However, at least as important as getting the material would be to have it
1. available, and 2. identifyable.

What I mean is that it is little worth to have large numbers of whatever
material if it is hard for people to come by the material. Best would be to
have it available on the web, and I think the money would be well spent that
was spent on scanning the material that has been liberated, so that it can
actually be accessed from all over the world.

The second is of different importance for different resources - for a book,
if we know title and author, people can just check for themselves whether it
is usable. But a photo collection is worth little if there is no information
added on *what* is actually on the photograph. Having photographs of
thousands of moderately famous people is worth little unless it actually
says WHO is on the photo. Likewise, photographs of past news events would be
very good to have, but only if descriptions are provided as to what news
event is depicted. 100 pictures of "some politician talking to a group of
people" are not as good as one of "Imre Nagy announcing Hungary's withdrawal
from the Warsaw Pact".

-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels
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