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Wikipedia's $100 Million Dream
An anonymous reader writes "Jimmy Wales recently asked the Wikipedia community to suggest useful, 'works that could in theory be purchased and freed' assuming a 'budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights.' He went on to say that he has spoken with a person 'who is potentially in a position to make this happen.' Ideas are being collected at the meta-wiki. Some early suggestions include, satellite imagery, textbooks, scientific journals and photo archives." So how about it? What works would you like to see wikified?
I think that this would be a good target as far as literature is concerned. I know that this costs ~$8k on Amazon so the copyrights are probably worth a lot but I think that a lot of these titles are public domain. If they are, I think it would be worth making a proposition in the millions to Penguin for their editions to be made available on the Wiki. I'm a computer scientist so I don't know how realistic this would be. Of course, they could probably host Project Gutenberg for free if they wanted.
As far as educational works go, I'm all for the textbooks. Grade school & high school, of course. But what I'd really like to see is the "Canonical works" of each field. I'm talking about the standard books that are used to teach each major in the United States. They could do a survey of books and then attempt to contact the authors & publishers to work a deal. Some titles I've seen on everyone's shelves are, of course, the Donald Knuth series and this list has a lot of standards I recognize just by the covers.
The most important thing for them to do would to pay lawyers and literature experts to scan the internet for potential authors willing to put out books for free. I've seen some classic computer science books go up like this and I'm sure that if Wikipedia asked for permission to host, they would be able to with mild restrictions. Like the author having the final say on what is kept and removed from the Wiki page. I mean, look at O'Reilly's OpenBook Project, don't you think they would allow Wikipedia to host that for a tiny one time fee? I'd bet that sales would increase if they even put a link to buy the book. I've heard a lot of authors argue for their books to be put online so that people will feel compelled to buy a hardcopy. Wasn't that the point of Google's textbook preview search?
Other people they could target is an open invitation to any estates that own the rights of long dead authors to have their ancestor's works published. Dr. Suess, anyone? I mean, how do you license a loved one's works and continually soak up money for them? To me, the work of Disney in this respect is just plain rotten and ruined some good guidelines to release works to the public domain.
I don't know, I just think that they should spend money over a period of time searching for permission to host books for free or nearly free. I have hope that this is done very very well and augments the OLPC project nicely.
My work here is dung.
Maybe without that incentive, Disney will stop lobbying for copyright extensions? That way we can actually make use of all this material again.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
o/^ Write for us a trilogy, a four- or five-book trilogy... o/^
I wonder how many people might get drawn into reading sequels if the first book in a series or trilogy were made available for free?
A history of Pornography would be very informative.
You could generate new works under creative commons licences or other. I would start with a textbook for every subject and then spend the rest on 1000 new novels from every part of the world.
My little Linux and tech blog
Open content GIS data from around the world. It would make developing the next generation of location aware devices/webpages a reality
If you are going to make a $100m philanthropic gesture, which I assume this is, then surely you would want to see the largest possible impact for your effort. Remove the copyrights from the books necessary to give the impoverised of the world free access to the materials required for a decent education and I'm sure that those with the necessary skills to translate those works into as many languages as required and teach it to those willing to listen will step forwards as well.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
One book per academic subject.
One for each kind of math.
One for each kind of music.
One for each kind of computer science.
One for masonry, or automotive, or other trades.
and so on...
So, someone can go to the "tutorial" section of wikipedia and learn how to do whatever they would normally need textbooks or college to learn.
Granted that you could likely only reach an ametuer level this way most of the time, it would be a great starting point for a lot of people into business and hobby.
Gentlemen, the time to accomplish the long-expressed dream of Slashdot has come!
With this funding, I believe that we may at long last be able to open-source Natalie Portman.
Does that mean, let open to vandalism and subtle defacement?
If so, then I want nothing wikified.
I would enjoy having access to public domain GIS data. I currently have access to lots of it (generated by the gov't no less) under restrictive licenses through my uni, but I can't do anything public with it without licensing it for commercial use.
Think of all the nice free applications that could be built and integrated into wikipedia if we had public domain GIS data and sattelite imagery for the entire planet. I guess it will happen in my lifetime as copyrights and whatnot expire, but it would be nice if it was before my 80'th bd. (Fuck you Disney)
Entertainment: The classic "nerd" stuff- Hitchiker's Guide, Lord of the Rings, etc... All the classics, Shakespearean works, that sort of thing. Education is of course a key, and all the major scientific writings, from Newton's Optiks on should be free, but "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"- focusing entirely on Information while forgetting Entertainment will not be as good.
Care about privacy? Read this!
I'd like the collective works of Britany Spears to be freed.
Just kidding. Really! But you have to admit, if they were, then Wikipedia would have a whole different crowd suddenly interested in encyclopedias.
Oh You POS
A few years ago I took a GPS that kicked out serial positioning data, and a laptop that I had used to suck overhead satellite potography from teraserver, and had a genuine james bond dashboard radar thing. Novelty, but fun anyway to watch the red dot move around on the satellite map and know it's you. Found some places and roads in town that I didn't know existed and that were not on any map.
I had a hard time finding additional imagery after teraserver sold out. (to MS iirc?) I would like to have even been able to order it, but USGS charges a fortune for their quarter quads and you don't get the high resolution coordinates for each area on the map due to them not being photographed perfectly square. This is something that I would like to see opened up.
One thing to bear in mind unfortuantely is that this information goes stale. google maps is about 15 years out of date for half my city. So this would have to be renewed occasionally to stay of value.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
While there are plenty of things that could/should be wikified and added to Wikipedia's knowledge base, it would also be nice to help people use the things that are already present.
Specifically, I'm talking about the open formats upon which Wikimedia insists, and the lack of support for those formats on Mac OS X. Audio must be Vorbis and video Theora, but there isn't any convenient way to play these. Sure there are ports of mplayer and other such tools, but the average OS X user isn't willing to use tools with non-standard UIs and flaky behavior. IMHO there should be an effort to create plugins for Quicktime that allows seamless playback of Vorbis and Theora content with iTunes and/or Quicktime Player. This would include playback on the iPod.
I cringe every time I see a link to an audio or video file on a Wikimedia site, because I know that in order to view the content I'm going to need to fire up some program other than iTunes if I want to watch it. iTunes is well-designed and feels comfortable, and the third-party media players can't help but feel different—not to mention that it's impossible to play, say Vorbis music and iTS music with the same program.
The contribution of money towards a Quicktime component—or even to Apple, as that's where iPod changes would have to come from—might not be a frivolous use of a $100 million grant.
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
I would like to see technical service manuals for all automobiles greater than 10 years old made availiable. Also high quality scans of most major periodicals and optical character recognized so that they can be searchable.
English isn't my first language and I often spend good time searching for the right words to translate some term one way or the other.
Wikipedia could be a great platform to host dictionaries on. Every article/term should have an option to translate the term.
I know that the feature is half-way there already in the way that you can find the same article in a different language, but that doesn't work that great as a two way dictionary.
Buy a good base of dictionaries translating criscross between all (ok most of) the languages on wikipedia.
Sid Meier's Colonization! I would love to have an open source and Linux version of that! Yes, I know of FreeCol, but that's not the same...
Get the rights to the "best of breed" textbooks; I know there are clear favorites in Engineering and Mathematics. From there, use them as the base in wiki format to extend them. A good set of undergraduate texts would do lots of good for the developing world and poor students everywhere. Buying books is EXPENSIVE, and in most engineering related disiplines, a real waste, since the base mathematics has not changed in many years.
..don't panic
- The Lexis Nexis database
- All scientific works ever written. This is work done by scientists for the betterment of mankind and to have it locked away from the public behind electronic library access fees is absurd. The public has a right to academic works, not just academics.
-- Bob1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I'm sure other will grumble because this is American-Centric, but thanks to recent (and absurd to the point of perversion) copyright extensions here in the U.S. many of our classic cultural works remain locked up... you think that poem you read in gradeschool by Robert Frost was public domain?
And sadly, our copyrights reverberate to other countries thanks to treaties and the WTO... just look at Australia.
I always wanted to print my own copies. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
hookers and beer!
build a time machine, so that I could go forward in time far enough that all books are public domain, and bring them all back now. Now that would be a sound investment...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
...of Britney Spears!
Seriously, though, I think the idea of paying for copyrighted material whose current owners are the most active in enforcing their copyrights could either: (1) dramatically reduce the litigation; or, (2) further validate the idea of copyright and thus increase litigation.
Also, Wikipedia would have to make lots of copyright purchases really quickly to avoid copyright owners catching on and jacking up their prices.
I think a good start for Wikipedia would be all major college textbooks - the huge ones used in core classes like: biology, physics, calculus, English, economics, psychology, etc. The benefit to society would be huge; students around the world would have access to these expensive and informative texts.
How much did it cost Disney to buy the senators and congressmen who voted for the latest copyright extension?
Find free books.
I would suggest the money should be used instead to support a powerful well-funded lobbying effort for copyright reform, perhaps helping any number of the existing organisations such as Union for the Public Domain. There are many issues - the unnecessarily huge and increasing length of copyright terms, the inaccessibility of orphan works whose copyright owners cannot be traced, questions of balance between just rewards to creators and fair use/dealing for consumers, non-expiry of DRM even after nominal copyright expiration, etc. Spending USD 100m on a number of popular copyrights is very generous, but copyrights can be extremely expensive, and USD 100m is a tiny bit of the total value of all the still current copyrights. Reforming copyright, however, would change the future for all copyright works, something which could be of greater long-term value to society, commerce and industry including the copyright holders.
Scroogle
"Create a non-profit that researches 'orphaned' works for copyright status. A large percentage of works published post-1923 are eligible for public domain status but it requires time and work to track down the copyright holders."
This suggestion is already in the list, and it is far and away the best suggestion I have seen.
- The Feynman Lectures
- Weinberg, volumes 1-3
- Landau and Lifschitz
- Zinn-Justin
- Wald
- Kleinert
to name but a few.Where are they getting 100M from? Could it be that the Wikipedia Foundation is considering to stop being a non-profit organisation and start placing advertising in its articles?
Our founding fathers never intended for copyrights to last FOREVER as the do now, but for "limited times.' I think a little peace of that 100 million should be used to get copyright abuser enablers out of office. For one, find a another republican (red state Utahns will never vote for a democrat on principle alone) to replace Orrin Hatch PLEASE.
He was a big sponser of the Copyright Term Extension Act, DMCA, the patriot act II on steroids, FBI carnivore, extended wiretapping, and his office wanted to get the Claritin patent extended because he was using their jet when running for president.
Anything to get this IP black hole out of office will reap a 10x benifit in the future, and not just for better copyright law.
Once that is done, get a repeal of the bastard CTEA law (it won't happen while he is in the senate). In fact, bet on a CTEA II to come down the pike to protect that nasty rodent
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I own the copyright to several essays, papers, and pieces of software I'd be willing to offer for this project. When do the negotiations begin?
All those lovely historical journals and publications. Probably wouldn't cost too much, either.
It's my son's first birthday on Tuesday and I'll be singing Happy Birthday to him. That's a copyrighted song, with royalties payable on public performance I believe.
Would be a nice touch to put that one into the public domain.
Cheers,
Ian
Seems a good (and relevant) place to start.
Think about this in conjunction with the one-laptop-per-child project: what if third world countries suddenly had access to Wikipedia? Where would you put your hundred million bucks to buy content that would make the human race better off simply by having access to this knowledge?
I understand why people are suggesting basic textbooks, but they're taking too much for granted.
Start by acquiring the best English skills courses so that these billions of third world kids will be able to understand first world content.
Giving a kid a laptop only gets them so far: they have to be able to understand what they're viewing. That's where the $100 mil could really leverage all of Wikipedia's existing content. Make it easy for these kids to learn English, no matter which language they're starting from.
What's your damage, Heather?
The entire photographic corpus of Giovanni Aria.
Without a doubt what needs to be bought by the wikifoundation to be freed is windows!
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
They shouldn't have been so vocal about this. Now everyone knows they have a $100 million budget, and every rightsholder they approach is going to put his pinky to his lips and do his best Dr. Evil impression.
For sure there are plenty works still under copyrights that are almost monetarily worthless, yet have many years to go before falling into the public domain. They will remain where they are as there is no reason for the copyright holder to give them up.
However..... if a copyright holder is made an offer for a given piece ($1,000, $10,000, whatever) - a very straightfoward commercial decision can be made; One free of copyright religion and politics. "Is the future returns on the copyright of this piece worth less than the offer."
Someone who has a copyrighted item earning $12.50 per year might easily be swayed to release it into the public domain for $200. Almost *nothing* under copyright is actually earning any real money, and thefore may be liberated with a very modest purse.
Perhaps if there was a simple online process in place, individuals could seach for their items of choice, pay up and free them.
Most people that have the cash and some inclination simply don't have the time. If those who have the time could make this process trivial, everyone could win.
Now please excuse me - I have to RTFA
I don't know if "wikified" is the right term, but I've always thought that
classic "no-longer-for-sale" games should be handed over to the public domain.
The intellectual property for future projects and sequels should of course
remain in the hands of the copyright holder. It seems to me that this is a win/win
for publishers since the properties would gain a new lease on life.
Really, I just want to be able to download M.U.L.E., some Infocom titles
and Master of Orion (although I'm not sure I need another addiction in my life
right now).
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
1) Invest $1 million to find the best research group.
2) Invest $7 million on a research to find out what's potentially the best idea.
3) Invest $2 million on a team with capability to evaluate the best idea.
4) Invest $9 million on creating a small-scaled model of the best idea.
5) Invest $6 million on a research to find out how the audience will cope with the idea.
6) Invest $21 million on software from Microsoft.
7) Take back $11 million (the remains of the $21 million spent on Microsoft) after you've found out that the same thing can be done in India for $2 million.
8) Use the remaining dollars for marketing.
At least that's how I'd do it..
Full Tilt
Every single word ever written on the subject, on a Wiki, for the world to have access to ..
Call up novell and buy Unix and open source it all. beyond that standardized k-12 textbooks with interactive test databases so teachers can make custom exams. and make the whole thing available as a turnkey server schools could just plug-into their network and supply copies on DVD or BlueRay that would hold every single text. Imagine little Jimmy being issued a laptop containing every textbook he will every use. Hey we might even save enough money to hire more than one teacher for every 50 students
The best of the best.
Wouldn't everyone like to see certain standards (like the IEEE POSIX standard) become oepn? As well as like all books so long as there are PDF versions made available :)
Semper Fi
It really won't. Lobbyists and a propaganda machine for a couple years, or a popular tiny fraction of protected works, or whatever. It might make a few waves in the pond, but it's not going to change the water or the cretins lurking therin. You're gonna have to get closer to a billion to blow the current mess out of the water. Really.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
I'd love to see them acquire The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Opening up a classic resource for 'normal' people, to everyone, would be huge.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
10,000,000 copies of Linux!
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Most of these are owned by private entities, making it quite difficult to access the information -- for example, a copy of the California building codes costs close to $500 in three-ring binder form. Most jurisdictions incorporate the copyrighted documents into law by reference only, trying to sidestep the problem that the law of the land is not copyrightable.
My core computer science texts date back more than ten years. They are still perfectly relevant today. Core subjects in computer science have not changed in ages. Data structures, operating systems, networking, relational databases all go back more than two decades. And they are just as, if not more, relevant today.
The key is to acquire texts on core concepts. These are things that should hold true forever. You would not want to waste money on Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days. For things like that, someone will write up a tutorial. Instead you would acquire works on the concepts of higher-level languages, virtual machines, design patterns, etc.
Sony DRM? I kid... Not text books in the new sense. You could waste a lot of money on text books that would be out of date in a few years. I would go with the top 1000 text books used over the past 25 years. The classics that don't go 'out of date'. Or 1000 top checked out library books over the past 25 years.
I have to build and design things around a whole crap load of "standards"...UL, IEEE, ASTM, DIN, ISO and so forth. In almost every case I have to pay for an electronic or paper copy of these documents.......and they are almost always HUGE and filled with cross-references.....Want to improve world wide productivity, better understanding and implentation of these "standards" ?...Wiki them. As a bonus this would give us all the ability to help point out conflicting and/or just plain unintelligible parts of these "standards".
That's too much of a cash cow for those publishers. It would make better sense to have a national law passed concerning access to codes. Too bad congree is bunch of whores.
There are classic textbooks, especially for mathematics and science, that would help students learn and come up with new ideas. The philosophy behind wikipedia is the free exchange of ideas, which would really be enhanced if they put otherwise expensive textbooks, like Calculus books or Quanum Physics books, or even Medical texts, on their sites. I always want to learn physics and math concepts, but I find myself looking at textbooks on amazon that are way too expensive. IN order to further human knowledge and fulfill the ethos of wikipedia, put textbooks on wikipedia.
JSTOR has back issues of several hundred well known journals, dating back to 1665. The bulk of scientific knowledge is in there. Web of Science is an index of basically every scientific paper that has ever been published. I belive that puting these resources in the public domain would accelerate the creation of scientific knowledge. Imagine the millions of intelligent people that today can't access these sources because they are expensive. Also, making scientific knowledge available for public scrutiny would make scientists more accountable for their work.
IMDB, while free for personal use, is bound by a obtuse copyright that bars any of that data for anything else. This information started as a user contributed Usenet listing and even today the information is contributed by users. Not only that, but all of this information is publically accessible and not proprietary.
While I will agree with subsequent posters that contend this is not the most critical information, it may be a low hanging fruit.
Likewise Gracenote is a database of publically accessible information in a proprietary, copyrighted format. This information needs to be opened up for the public domain and made available in a common format. This should be the first step in breaking down proprietary databases of public information.
wikipedia doesn't need books because hosting books is not its purpose. however it needs lots of multimedia contents to illustrate its articles, and most importantly, pictures. there are many excellent historical pictures that are still copyrighted. for example i find it sad that there are no pictures associated to the pulitzer prize article, for obvious reasons. i think that getting the copyright of a good archive of well-known pictures would be a great enhancement to wikipedia
Flash (unfortunately), WMA, MP3, OGG, Theora, practically any avi file on the planet work fine in Fedora Core 5 (if you install the non-redhat packages) or in Mandriva or Ubuntu. Even silly places like the Disney website full of flash games work fine in Linux with very little extra downloading if you choose a non-fedora distribution.
Between Xine, Mplayer and the official flash plugin, you can be subjected to every stupid flashing advertisement on every web page on the net. Out of the box, Ubuntu and mandrive support more media formats than a default Windows XP installation.
Good idea concerning The Penguin Classic Library, but the thing is, most of the titles in the collection are already 100% free from copyright restrictions, making purchasing the rights to them a foolish endeavor. Dickens? Shakespeare? Plato? That's all public domain stuff, and most of it is already available on Gutenberg. The $7,989.50 that you're charged is literally to defer the costs of printing and shipping to you 1,082 different paperback books.
There already is a wiki for James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. It takes advantage of WikiMedia formatting and thus is "wikified." Every two or three words, there's a link to some obscure reference that good ol' Jimbo [Joyce] made, so you can understand the novel, if you really really want to.
There is a drawback to this, though. James Joyce did not intend that the novel be understood. It was meant to model a dream -- albeit a boringly long one -- and if someone wakes you up every two seconds to tell you what something means, it's not as fun. Annotated, it's like reading Nabokov's version of Eugene Onegin, and if given the choice, I would not have that one wikified, with all due respect to that Lolita guy.
While the Wake wiki is good for comprehension and finally understanding what that huge word in the second paragraph was, the addition of technology makes it inferior to the original. Obviously, you can ignore the links, but in several other cases with e-books, reading a book is made more inconvenient by wikifying it. There is no real electronic substitute for "flipping through a book", and the simple format of a single finite page, as opposed to turtles all the way down. (Just check out an e-book: most of the time, the webpages are huge.)
Oh, and Gutenberg? If anything, have Wikipedia partner with them, if the two are not in cahoots already. No use forming a needless schism in the world of free online e-books.
You could feed many starving people with that money.
Runescape Classic, IS DEAD an im sure ppl would LOVE to have it back around like it was in the old days, its tons of fun!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Then u guys can crack down on that stupid reinet site that has all them cheatin @$$holes
peace,
Juggy
This is a sad but unfortunately maybe the most effective use.
$100M may spent in Washington on lawmakers may help change copyright laws altogether. Maybe a 100:1 return on investment compared to buying copyrighted work.
Use the money to lobby for copyright law similar to how it was in 1920: 14 years after the work was done.
Every year since then, it has increased with at least a year, so no work copyrighted since 1923 has ever seen its copyright expire. (Think Disney here)
Lets start allowing copyrights expire like they should.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Buying copyright for books for 100 million wouldn't improve Wikipedia. It would improve their sister-project Wikibooks.
I say screw buy copyrights, that will only encourage people to stick to their damn copyright in hope that someone buys them.
I say invest in servers and networks with greater performance and uptime.
As soon as Boxcar Willie is in the public domain, we are all free. Oh wait. Maybe it's Steamboat Willie. It's one of those two.
Consider the economics of it:
3,860,567 = Number of 20 year olds (2000 census rough estimate based on 1/5th of 20-24 year olds)
27% = Percent of population over 25 with a bachelor's degree (2000 census)
25% = Percent of students taking the most popular/useful classes (estimate)
50% = Percent of these students using the most popular textbook (estimate)
5 = Years a textbook edition remains in print (estimate)
6% = Risk free rate of return (estimate)
$100 = Average textbook price (estimate)
20% = McGraw hill net margin (per www.fool.com)
The textbook company would sell 131,259 textbooks per year, for a net profit of $2,625,186 annually. Given the 5 year life span and 6% risk free rate, the textbook company would be willing to sell a textbook with the above expected sales for no less than $11 million. This means we could purchase roughly 9 of the most popular textbooks for $100 million. May be off by a fair margin, but it's clearly not going to be near 100 textbooks. Seems like there are much better uses of the money.
$100 million would be a hefty campaign contribution to every US Rep and Senator, even divvied up like that-probably enough to get the dang laws changed to very short term copyrights with more substantial "fair use" provisions and maybe enough to lose the DMCA! If it was in the same bill...I say go for it, piece meal a few works isn't cost effective at all, it leaves the problem intact, so do ALL of them with that cash.
I second that. I'm tired of buying Chilton books every time I want to work on a car. Open source the combustible engine now! ;)
On my EE degree program, a couple of our professors handed out full photocopied sections of the pages we needed to save us from having to buy the books. Since they owned the copyright, they figured it was theirs to do with as they pleased. (Of course those were generally not the same professors that drove sports cars)
I wouldn't be surprised if you could find academically minded authors who'd take a relatively small payoff and the feeling that they'd done good for the world.
if you buy the books in india or somewhere, you will find that they are already about US$5-10 each
Keep in mind that the University of California system payed $8 million to one publisher (Elsevier), just for access (not rights) to that publisher's journals for only two years. Those journals make up only 25% of the journal subsciptions in the UC system.
Getting broad rights to scientific articles across many fields would be nearly impossible in the current culture of journal price-gouging. Support of one of the many attempts to break this business practice would be great.
Let's have a party! Everyone's invited.
For $100 million dollars, a lot of people have talked about buying existing textbooks for education, but what about using the money to start the creation of new ones that are designed from the ground up in the wiki format.
I think it would make sense to hire professionals to perform edits and create base models for textbooks for classes in specific fields which could then be edited as needed perhaps with keeping some sort of professional editorial oversight.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
seriously, I imagine printed material from Hustler magazine and the like are a lot cheaper thanks to the contributions of the interweb.
I would still swear I read wiki for the articles though.
ôó
For 12 to 18 million dollars (US) you could create a complete reading program for the K through 6 grade levels, including teaching materials. I have worked on most of the major programs, which are $100M dollar programs. Without actual print products, there would be significant cost savings. For $100M a complete program across Spanish, Chinese, and English could be created. State specific materials could be tied to a subsciption model returning the significant portions of the money over several years. The best kind of philanthropy, profitable!
An editorial team could be drawn from the very same people who have created the products currently in use. A full, usable set could be accomplished in 18 months or less. The quickest I've seen being 12 months requiring 3 writer/editors, a designer, and a production person per grade.
n i c h o l a s [at] e d u k 8 . c o m
What about using the money to build a peer-reviewed open access platform?
They then could provide peer-review for free for some time and then introduce a business model that works for longer time. ( author pays for the peer review or maybe they find other funders) Propably some of the money could be used to buy a collection of papers for a head start.
In that case, they could propably become the number one open-access journal.
So, I know nothing about this subject, but aren't a lot of classics out of the realm of copy protection already? I mean, I would think that Mark Twain would be free by now, but if not, certainly a lot of really old texts are, right? I recently had to buy a copy of a particular book (translated) written over a thousand years ago because I couldn't find the text available online.
So really my question is... why don't we (or I, it's possible I'm just looking in all the wrong places) see a lot of classics free online already? Certainly several publishers still print the works of Voltaire, but it can't be their property, can it?
Please enlighten me. Like I said, I don't really understand copyrights.
And fix the root of the copyright problem.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
In the same vein, I was thinking "Congress". Not the Library of Congress, but the actual, you know, Congress. How many congressmen could be bought for $100M? I'm not sure, you'd probably have to ask the RIAA/MPAA, but maybe it would be enough to push through some meaningful copyright reform.
Yes, $100 Million is a vast amount of wealth, which can be made more powerful if spent over time, as I assume any donor would require. I assume we are not looking for a one-time binge of purchases. The idea of spreading out acquisitions over time would prevent "bidding up the market". Philanthropic gestures can be very shrewd. "Free" money needn't be "easy-come-easy-go". If this idea catches on, a popular trust can attract more donations (so don't rule out spending a little on "marketing", in addition to acquisitions. [I am not in the marketing field.])
I am sure that is why the "wisdom of crowds" has been brought to bear on this opportunity. However, if it were known that there were a "run" on, say mid-twentieth century SF novel copyrights, the price might go up more than if there were a slow paced purchase of the same titles, over time. After all, that particular category, while near and dear to many a Slashdotter, is, in the end, a luxury and not an essential work of knowledge.
Money is easy to make, but "real money" is hard to accumulate. Once it is dispersed it is gone. Over time, you fight inflation, but in this case, it is somewhat balanced by the diminishing value of the copyrights it seeks to purchase.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Reasoning that:
a) It's better to buy newer copyrights, because 'nearly expired' copyrights will run out soon, and taking an optimistic stance that common sense will prevail over the Disneys of the world and reduce the length of copyrights in future.
b) It's going to be cheaper to buy things before they are successful rather than after
and
c) Authors of copyrighted works will object to thier income supply being turned off
I suggest investing in new talent.
Offer musicians the following deal:
1) We'll press your music onto CDs, and sell them to anyone in the world for $10 each. You get 80% of any profits.
2) We'll sell mp3s, and lossless files at $0.99 a track and give you 80% of the profits
3) 5 years from the day we make it available, it goes into the public domain.
4) Here's a community of freelance record producers, cd-inlay designers, marketing organisations, tour managers etc. who are willing work for a percentage if they like your music. Do anything you like with them, but we get the rights, and it all goes into the public domain after 5 years.
5) We pay an advance or do marketing based on peer-review of your work, if your music is really good, you'll get a big advance against future earnings from our $100m.
6) We charge $0 per play for radio and TV performances.
That's a whole load better than any RIAA company will do, any major artist at the end of a contract would jump at it, and radio/TV stations will love it too.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
No kidding. Most of these suggestions involve buying copyrights from companies that make millions on their publications in one year (dictionaries, auto-manuals, etc.). You think you're going to flash $10 mil in their face and convince them to basically sell their whole profit machine? $100 million will not buy out many works that are highly valuable. If they are that valuable, the company selling the works is making a lot of $$$.
I'd suggest things that don't get sold in book form. Things like satellite imagery or GIS data from 3 years ago. Stuff that can spur a multitude of hobby/amature prototype-grade proof-of-concept applications. But that would needd to be upgraded to the latest imagery or GIS data (that the respective companies will get paid for) to be precise and up-to-date. The companies get to keep their revenue stream and we get sweet data and imagery to write innovative apps with!
They're doing a good thing by putting it all online, and a good thing for making it free for the next few days, but after that it will become subscription access only.
Decry information hoarding!
For a small issue, all of them. But copyright is special. The people pushing for stronger copyrights are the media. The media have something which, to a congress-person, is worth more than money. They control the spin on every news story the congress-person is mentioned in. You will have to do a lot more than donate $100 million dollars if you want congress to vote against the media.
Focusing on a part of the first suggestion—buying lobbyists to make your case to Congress—what's to prevent the lobbyists you hire from playing both sides of the field, telling you what you want to hear (that they're working in your interests) until the money runs out then going back to their other client (some large corporate copyright holder) telling them what they want to hear?
Under this situation your purchased friends could bleed you dry of your $100M windfall knowing that you can't raise more. Then they return to business as usual representing the corporate book, music, and movie publishers. Whatever portion of the $100M they get is essentially a nice bonus for the lobbyists you chose to hire.
In exchange for buying some well-connected mouthpieces you get little in return for illustrating your faith and validation of a system built to favor the wealthy. Maybe you end up participating in a bidding war for Congresspeople's ears, raising their price a little bit.
On a more personal level, it will become impossible for anyone who supports buying lobbyists to be taken seriously if they later criticize government run by those who can afford the most lobbyists.
Digital Citizen
While it's probably a good idea to put all scientific journals in the public domain in some way, or at least publicly available, wouldn't a Wiki be about the WORST way of doing it? Just wait for some wisenheimer to change the data, you'd go years without discovering it. Or changing the abstract of the paper to something entirely different than it used to be-- I mean 99% of people just read the abstract anyway.
In short, Wikipedia is a terrible place for scientific journals.
Comment of the year
Taking away the last line of defense by digitizing our schoolbooks is just not acceptable. You thing that e-book is going to be stopping bullets?
o otings.textbooks.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/10/20/school.sh
..would be a copyright free $100 bill.
All awesome databases of documents that I cannot afford to access.
Especially Project Muse...crazy sweet stuff
The universal cookbook for toolmakers, engineers and everyone else involved in manufacturing. They're like $70 a piece and even more for the electronic version, the single most useful book I've ever owned... (Of course, if you're not a machinist it's not that useful, but hey, we are still a manufacturing country aren't we?)
It is the culmination of human knowledge of metalworking. If it was released on the interweb human progress in all fields around the world would benefit.
I would love to see Nikola Tesla's entire works be cataloged in Wiki...Too band they were all destroyed in a "mysterious fire" that happened within days after his "mysterious" death. Maybe also the entire documented works of like (but lesser) minds such as Edison, Bell, Franklin, and any others people could suggest along similar lines of engineering expertise.
Every anatomical, figure drawing, life, perspective, nature, technique book, pamphlet and lecture transcript available mouldering in the rare books catalogue of every art library in the world. Every technique for every drawing, painting, craft and sculpting material imaginable whether current or ancient, with links to the scientific origin and cultural importance of each in their respective time periods through the present.
I fail to see how obtaining rights to some prestigious knowledgebase (e.g. "best of breed" textbooks) and opening it up so any schmuck can change it...er, enhance/improve it... would be a good thing. These resources are already "best of breed" for a reason...opening it up to anybody kind of takes away from that respect the resource would have rightfully earned.
Reality > wikiality
Text books, for instance. Where countries have radically different curriculum at different years, and text books do change from year to year, and from location to location (economics, accounting, history, politics, botany, language, English, geography, medicine, pharmaceuticals, law, for example) ALL vary from year to year and from country to country.
Reminds me of the story of the very eminent economist who went back to his alma mater for a visit, and saw the current examination papers.
"Why, these are the self same questions I had to answer when I was here!" he exclaimed.
"Yes", replied the Dean, "But the answers are completely different!"
Repair manuals is another area where geographic and periodic differences would render anything of this nature very transient.
What is the average life of a model of car, or a model of washing machine, for instance. Not very long, if the marketers have any say about it. And not very geographically wide spread, either. In America, do you know what a 2006 Monaro, or Statesman, or even Falcon even look like? No, most of you, except for the car freaks probably say "No", and I'd say the same about your makes and models, too, of course.
Gutenberg, atlases, ancient literature and history, and just aboiut any material that doesn't impact on our daily lives, with multiple interpretations would be fine for this, but manuals, text books, histories - only if you want to kill Wikpaedia off as an internationally reputable repository of information.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
As a philosophy student, I experience this first hand. I needed Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics for my current moral philosophy class. I found a free translation, but it was nearly unreadable. The text my prof assigned was a more recent translation (Terence Irwin 1999) and was MUCH easier on the brain. For works in their original language, yes (I got my David Hume text off gutenberg), but translations need constant updating as language evolves, or you are dooming readers to a second-rate work.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
1) Assuming the capital (factories, roads, dams, mines, ships, etc) will magically disappear isn't sound. You're assuming something of infinitessimal probability (destruction of all durable goods, but survival of hundreds of millions of humans, and our environment). Also, if all that capital were gone, who could read this project?
2) Do you know how long it took us to do it the first time? The big problem of building the world isn't the technology - the problem is the shear cost of it all. It took something like 15,000 years to go from good stone tools to steam ships. That also required an increase in population from around 20 million to around 1 billion.
3) If there were a "post-apocalypse," the cost minimization strategy wouldn't be about knowing about technology, but rather establishing institutions that would enable collective effort. Same reason Africa has modern technology, but the farmers can't afford steel hoes let alone GM crops and combine harvesters.
If half of the world died, we'd have big problems. But half the coal miners, and half the geneticists and nuclear physicists, and half the politicians would likely survive. The shear numbers of these "specialists" in as large a population as we have on Earth would make the proportion of survivors roughly equal to the proportion of survivors in the general population.
Additionally, if our national product was cut in half, we'd be living like they did in the 1984. If cut into a quarter, life would regress to 1962. If to one tenth, to 1940. If to one twentieth, 1915. If to 100th, to 1872. Assuming we get back to 1872 means (in general) 1% of our population, and 1% of our capital (assuming technology benefits and lack of new job experience cancel each other out).
The worst known disease outbreak (smallpox in the Americas) killed about 95% over several centuries. Nuclear warfare between superpowers *might* be able to accomplish the same, but I personally doubt it. If both happened simultaneously and instantaneously, we'd be back to 1839. The amount of destructive effort necessary to take us back to before the Industrial Revolution is mind-bogglingly huge. Getting back to the stone-age is nigh impossible.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Buy an encyclopedia - not a copy of one, but the rights to one.
The NET Bible project has reached first edition completion that is free to download/distribute (and you can purchase a dead tree edition for reasonable cost).
A very good tool with plenty of translaters notes, etc.
Like pi? Try 10,000 digits.
...it will all be blown on Star Wars novels and official transcripts of "The Colbert Report".
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
The Kennedy assassination files.
25% = Percent of students taking the most popular/useful classes (estimate)
I know of no single class that 25% of university students take. If this is the estimate of all core courses, I would call it reasonable. Hovever, this being the case, the $11 million covers the most popular versions of textbooks for all courses. $11 million for the rights to enough textbooks for the first 2 years of college (when you take such classes as Calc I, European History, etc). That's a bargain.
A suggestion for a specific book is "A History of the Modern World" by Robert Roswell Palmer. Has been in use for 50+ years in universities, and is the canonical view of European History from the middle ages on. When you write revisionist history, HE is the standard you revise.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
especially the precious few I have published in obscure journals. Nobody reads them as it is, and since you're throwing money around, I'd be happy to sell them at $100,000 a piece!
While Wales is talking about this, the Internet Archive is quietly doing it and has been for several years now. There's a sizable book scanning effort underway, in cooperation with various libraries and Yahoo. Automatic book scanning equipment has been developed and is in use. The images of the pages are stored, and the text extracted with OCR for searching and other uses. They have over 33,000 books on line now.
Loading existing works into a wiki system isn't particularly useful, anyway. Making them editable probably won't make them better.
Steamboat Willy
[quote]
An editorial team could be drawn from the very same people who have created the products currently in use. A full, usable set could be accomplished in 18 months or less.
[/quote]
I would suggest that explaining calculus in a easy to understand manner is not as straightforward as you might think. Ditto engineering statics and dynamics, or undergraduate physics.
..don't panic
Main-stream newspapers and magazines that are now deceased would yield a broad array of useful articles and be inexpensinve (e.g., buy the Houston Post newspaper copyright which covers 1885 - 1995).
Not an amazing performer, not a really great car but they last like 13-15 years before they start to break down.
Put ALL the design into the public domain, let African's mine metal to make cars not to sell it overseas for foreigners to make cars and ship them back.
My 2c.
That's smart. He's going to sell wikipedia to someone (my guess is google or yahoo), pocket a good deal of cash, and use the rest of it on this stupid idea, not as good as the original wiki. Jimmy Wales now has an effective way of profiting off of wikipedia, and you geeks can't do anything about it but complain. So it goes.
I would love to see a solid set of free access online courses -- not just textbooks, but lecture video/audio, problem sets, explanatory software, etc. Maybe grant fellowships to experts to work on the materials, including access to relevant support staff (education specialists, illustrators, multimedia/web designers, etc). This would be much cheaper than buying existing copyrights -- paying a publisher to abandon a profitable book >> paying the author of that textbook to spend 3-6 months designing an online course.
I think an ideal subject would be language instruction. The ability for anyone with internet access to learn a foreign languange would be of real, tangible benefit to mankind. It's one of the few branches of learning where proving your competence relies on merit (i.e., TOEFL for English or JLPT for Japanese), rather than a diploma. In other words, if you learn a language, it is instantly a marketable skill, whereas reading every biology book ever written still won't get you a PhD, or a job.
If we're really concerned about global warming, species decline, etc. we're going to need all the Maps and Geo Data we can our hands to help us clean up this mess.
Very little of this information exists in the public domain and governments seem to moving toward making this data more and more proprietary.
In addition to the dearth of freely available data, a uniform encoding system would be really nice. Google Maps is only the beginning of what's possible and needed here.
Besides, it would help me figure out where to hide the starship...
That $100 mil could go a looooong way if you hired some of the best Olde Engllish/Ancient Greek/Ancient Hebrew/etc. translators to re-translate the works into modern languages.
The textbook ideas I'm seeing here are good, but instead of buying copyright, HIRE the best experts in several fields to write good in-depth summary texts. Even if you have to pay someone $100,000/yr you could hire a THOUSAND people for one year.
I'm sure there's a more intelligent way to do this than 1,000 ppl/year. If the 100 mil could be principal and you could get a nice 10% return (I'm assuming part of that is additional donations) then that's $10 million operating cash (per year) to run this translation/writing organization. Perhaps you could even treat this like a noble prize, where the honor is a large part of the reward.
Well, whatever's decided, I have a great respect for anyone wanting to do something like this. It could be as important to western civilization (and the world) as institutions like the Public Library or Public Universities. More power to ya!
--Jonathan
Lots of good reasons why a limited-version print edition, donated to the major libraries, would be a good idea.
Be heard || Be herd
How about a lobbying campaign to make government research again become public domain? Contractors and researchers now get to keep their data and publications, with the government only getting to use it. The public no longer can get that info, whether to check the work or develop it further.
Gutenberg, atlases, ancient literature and history
I agree that this would be good stuff to have digitized, but most of it is out of copyright anyway. It's not something you'd have to buy, which is the point of this whole discussion.
Project Gutenberg already has a fairly good repository of classic literature; their bias is towards stuff that can be distributed as text (so not so much maps and atlases), but their coverage of classic literature seems pretty good. I can only read English so I've no idea what their coverage in other languages is, but I think the French government has something similar going for their language, so there is at least some stuff out there.
I think the focus of the "$100M Question" is what stuff that's currently under copyright would we want to buy?
My answer to this is another question: 'What is at risk of disappearing if it isn't opened up?' There are a lot of classic movies and news reels that have never been digitized, which need to be preserved; a lot of WWII stuff for instance. That has a certain amount of worldwide interest, so it's not totally American-centric.
I don't think it's really proper to critcize too harshly on a site like Slashdot for having "un-international" responses, though, because you have to consider the audience. The majority of the respondants here are from the U.S., so naturally the preservation of American cultural artifacts is going to be favored. I'm sure if you asked this question in most other countries, you'd get similarly biased results.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I appreciate that there are issues with the copyright system, but aren't those issues really just symptoms of having a messed up political system in the first place? As long as mega-corporations, such as Disney, Sony and others, also have lawyers, lobbyists bureaucrats, not to mention billions of dollars and a steady income, I doubt that $100 million will go very far. If it accomplishes anything, the fundamental consequences of the current system will probably just put things back again within a decade or two.
It's an interesting idea to spend money on this problem. If anything, though, I think it should be spent on communicating the idea to people and trying to think of ways to get them to realise both how screwed up the system is, and what they need to do to change it. Perhaps actually demonstrating to people the positive effects of shorter copyright terms would be a good way to start, as well as doing away with that myth about artificially defined copyright ownership being so comparable with real ownership. It also needs to be spent in a way that would out-smart the mega-corps, or preferably hit on issues that they simply can't argue with. The only way things can really change long term is if the people whom the government represents actually see what's going on, and decide not to accept it.
C S S
i finally want to be able watch legally purchased dvds legally using a free(speech) dvd player software
using libdvdcss to watch your legally purchased dvds is illegal...
I don't know the price on that, though...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I didn't get much calculus, statics or dynamics in K-6.
Someone who has a copyrighted item earning $12.50 per year might easily be swayed to release it into the public domain for $200. Almost *nothing* under copyright is actually earning any real money, and thefore may be liberated with a very modest purse.
Perhaps if there was a simple online process in place, individuals could seach for their items of choice, pay up and free them.
This is the best idea I've heard in this thread so far.
There have to be a lot of copyrighted works held by "estates" and descendants of authors or creators, who would readily convert their trickle of income into cash given the opportunity.
I'm thinking of the ads I see all the time for various firms that offer to convert the structured settlements given by many insurance companies into cash payouts. (E.g. these guys run a lot of really obnoxious TV ones in my area.) I could see setting up something like this, but advertising instead to people who are collecting very small royalties on copyrights that they hold.
Especially considering how long copyrights last now, there have got to be lots of people around who are holders of rights that they don't care about or will never use. A straight-up buyout of these works might bring in a lot. Sure, a lot of it might be relatively unimportant, but the more the merrier.
You could create some sort of "base rate" for published works no longer earning any royalties; say $50 for the rights to a novel, $75 for a non-fiction work. There'd have to be standards, to keep people from just trying to flood it with junk (maybe it would need to be works that had more than a few thousand copies published). On works that are still earning royalties, offer to buy the rights according to the same rates that a settlement-buyout company would purchase an annuity. I'm sure you could turn up all kinds of stuff just by running some broadly targeted radio or TV ads.
There are lots of people who would rather have money in their pocket now, than a slow trickle of income for the next century or so. If you wanted to get the biggest "bang for your buck" (or bang for your hundred-mil), those are the folks you need to find.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Where can I find Song of the South in pristine digital restoration? And even for movies that have been published on VHS/DVD, what about the decade while the movie remains in the "vault" (a periodic sales moratorium to reduce the number of SKUs Disney sells at once)?
I'd vote for putting research journals and textbooks online.
It's not that I disagree with you precisely, but I really think people are missing the boat by all saying "let's put textbooks online."
Textbooks don't go obsolete from one edition to the next because any new content is really added, they get minor changes added in order to keep people buying new books. If you put the content of one edition online, you're not changing this. They'll just introduce some new content, or write a new book, and then next year that'll be the required text. The "online textbook" that you spent so much time, money, and effort on, will be as obsolete as the 5-year-old paper textbooks that get sent to the furnace or to the shredder, because the problems in the back are numbered differently than in this year's edition. You're not solving any problem by putting them online. Paper textbooks would be cheap and long-lasting and readily available, except for the blatant manipulation that goes on by the publishing companies, in order to keep sales up. Putting a version online isn't going to break this cycle of price manipulation; it's just like making lots of copies of one particular paper edition. Unless you were going to fight them dollar-for-dollar (buying the rights to each new edition of every book) until they eventually just went bankrupt or stopped fighting, they're going to do everything they can to keep the online books from being useful. And given how they manage to keep a perfectly-servicable paper book that just happens to have a few minor differences from being useful, I think your chances of making an online textbook (with all the problems that being an 'online book' entails) useful is basically nil.
Trying to create online textbooks is a financial sinkhole. Unless you had more money to throw at the problem than all the publishing companies who would try to destroy you (and $100M is not nearly enough), you're going to fail. Instead, a better move would be to try to just get all the information online in some non-textbook format. Wikipedia is IMO a response to this; it's an attempt to end-run textbooks, by removing the monopoly they have over informational content. It accomplishes many of the same functions that digitizing textbooks would, in terms of preserving and making information available.
Rather than spending a ton of money to put textbooks online, which basically doesn't preserve any information that's not readily available today anyway, I think we need to take a look at what stuff is floating around, that's going to disappear forever if it's not preserved. There is a lot of primary-source material -- really irreplaceable stuff -- which is going to just cease to exist if we don't move quickly to copy and preserve it. In many cases, such as early film footage, copyrights prevent this process from occurring. This is where a large cash grant could come in handy.
Instead of taking information that's at no risk of disappearing from the world -- I can pretty much guarantee that regardless of what Wikimedia does, basic calculus isn't going to become a lost art -- and disseminating it, we should instead start from the very end of our back catalog and work forwards. Let's start with things that don't have much time left. All the decaying celluloid locked up in studios' vaults, or the original studio tapes of famous musicians that are rotting away due to improper storage. Let's make sure that gets saved first; because if we don't do it now, we won't have a second chance to go back later.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
start with something useful.
start with britannica.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Precisely. A few hundred people working full time to fill in the gaps and check the articles in the wiki would be a much better use of money.
Create a basic hierarchy of topics and courses, create basic templates for typical courses, and allow teachers (and students, and everyone) from all over the world to upload their content. I imagine people sharing their slides, videos, quizzes, experiments, teaching tips, etc... This could potentially benefit billions of children.
Not much calculus? That's not what your dentist told me.
Not much statics? I take it you never shuffled across the carpet in your socks and then grabbed a doorknob.
Not much dynamics? That's more of the sorry state of music education than anything else.
These are really only temporary shortages. Annoying to you or me, certainly, but from the very long view -- and that's the one I think we need to be taking -- very little information is at stake of being lost forever as a result of Disney's market-manipulation. (Unless some political-correctness Nazi goes after the Song of the South masters, but I doubt this.) There is a big difference between something that's inaccessible but preserved, and something that's inaccessible because it has been permanently lost. It's the difference between imprisonment and execution; one is temporary, the other is forever.
Before we start in on the Songs of the South and others of their ilk -- tucked safely away, but held back from distribution by someone's conscious desire -- we need to acquire and copy all the content that's not being preserved. There is a TON of primary-source material from some of the most significant events in the 20th century -- some which unquestionably have significance to all of humanity -- which is not being preserved due to copyright problems, or simple mismanagement. (And this is only going to get worse in the future, as more of our history is recorded in mediums that aren't traditionally archived, unless we make an effort to do something. Read the Ars article about the problems one guy had just trying to get video clips from a few years ago.)
Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit may be locked away in the Disney Vault, but their situation is significantly less dire than that of the thousands of hours of other material which is not being looked after by billionaire benefactors.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Instead of buying out individual copyrights, why not invest the $100 million in lobbyists to go head to head with Disney and fix the infinite copyright problem?
Rather than buy textbooks, it would be much more economical to pay someone to write one from scratch.
It's not going to happen, but I'd mostly be interested in the works in the Vatican Archives (even the secret stuff!). They've locked up a significant portion of our written human history and made them unavailable to folks.
$100 million may sound like a lot, but in what ways could it be more useful?
1. Establish a fund for purchasing copywrite.
This would let you purchase more, over a longer period of time, if not the most prized or newest works.
2. Buy the copywrites but taper the prices off over time.
Making the works free can be made a good long term goal. If you reduce charges over time you can recoup some of the initial cost before turning the work over to the public domain.
3. Start a publishing house
I'll fund and publish your book, but you only get 10 years of royalties afterwhich it goes public domain. Hell this was the original intent of copywrite, so why not start it again?
-Ian
Spend the money obtaining ACTUAL ACCURATE INFORMATION.
Operation AAI. Coming soon to a dream near you.
-- pupkick
Everything made before 1992 (assuming the term was 14 years)
Star Wars. That would solve a lot of problems once and for all.
Oh, wait, did you say it was just a hundred mil?
Nevermind. A man's gotta dream.
I'd like to see the television archived (including ads). As tapes have gone out of fashion and is now just taking up valuable storage space I see no one looking out for the old stuff. Sure some TV stations do but afaik no central archive.
You could start here: Build a Complete Metalworking Shop From Scrap.
Start with basically nothing, and make your own foundry, lathe, milling machine, etc. -- $60. (I have no relation to it at all; I just found it online once.)
I'd like more video based learning resources, mainly dealing with the physical sciences, targeted at adult learners and college students.
i pline=0&grade=5&imageField2.x=10&imageField2.y=13
For example:
http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html?disc
Put it in a trust fund, using the income to copywrite many more publications.
I think that buying copyrighted works will work against wikipedia. It is currently maintained by people who do it gratis because they believe in the cause. Isn't there a risk that doing something like this will actually reduce these people's incentives to write to wikipedia?
The entire Windows 98 Source Code.
Think of the (Open Source) possibilities.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Online evolvable questions and answers, wouldn't that be a great idea?! Users can be allowed to question, answer, group, categorize, and tag. Users could find related questions and other variants, together and don't see any licenses associated with this. Will it be, wikianswers?! :)
Instead of purely buying texts that already exist for a likely bloated price, why not use the money to pay respected individuals to write stuff for them as well?
That way you'll get classical old stuff with fresh and new!
"you sonofabitch i didn't know!"
Yep, pay M$ to open source MS Office. -Well someone said think big :-)
BeOS source code
.....it is illegal to solve Math problems
Eclipse PDE and Me
I wish I had mod points just about now. JSTOR is an invaluable resource for research and learning, containing the back issues of a vast number of scientific journals, but it is open only to institutions that subscribe to it, and subscriptions do not come cheap. Getting it opened to the public would be an enormous boon for freedom of information and people's ability to educate themselves on any subject outside of educational institutions.
Dear Jimbo,
we surely need visions and dreams. But there hat work to be done too.
Forget the 100 million dollar for a moment. Just take about 100000 dollars - the Wikimedia Foundation has this kind of money - and do what has to be done.
The Wikipedia community is urgently waiting for things like stable versions or the single user login. Take some money and hire some developers to bring the process forward. Hire some legal experts to make a CC-compatible license for Wikipedia. Perhaps there is money for a press spokesman who could clear up common missunderstandings of Wikipedia and free knowledge.
If you want to spend a million dollars - how about a complete rewrite of Mediawiki? Or at least more efficient database solution?
All the information from tech books is already available freely on the net in some form. Historical data never goes out of date though, and is much harder to come buy. I'd buy the rights to newspaper archives.
There are thousands and thousands of films from the early to mid twentieth century, not to mention newsreels and other content, just rotting away. There isn't a huge market for any individual work, so publishers won't release them commercially, and no-one else can get at the content because of copyright. A project like this with an aim of getting content to everyone (rather than making profit) is an ideal way round this problem.
1729 = 9^3 + 10^3 = 1^3 + 12^3
Imagine how much more money Wikipedia could have to put towards projects like this if they introduced advertisements. Would people be more accepting because they're for a good cause? What about donations? Wikipedia has raised some good amount of money in the past. Imagine if people can donate to create a surplus that can be used to free more works. Picture having a goal set to achieve "4 Million dollars to free texbook X". It's certainly more motivating to donate that way. I certainly would. Just a few thoughts.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica
Make sure you localise the materials as well, you need a localisation team on top (I guess USians would probably call that 'localization' for a start :-) ). For example I am writing from the UK and I don't understand the concept of "K" and "6 grade" ( I am guessing K=5 year olds, 6 grade = 18 year olds? ...trying to work out at what happens at less than "0" to get me back to "K" in the alphabet :-) ) - we have a different educational system here. Cultural references may change from country to country and reading materials need to reflect it. Plus we all know the different local words, expressions and spellings that may confuse/ cause offense.
You wanted to open her ports.
Which of course begs the question of notes and explanations.
It's nice to have a translated/original language copy of something, but when it is philosophy, it's even nicer when it comes with footnotes and explanations of difficult terms. And yes, the ideas of philosophy to update and change as time goes on.
You miss out on all that with 'merely' the text, which is another reason why old works may need to be 'freed'.
(n/t)
I agree. Release the ROMs.
Make MAME free.
I would go for geographic layers. All kinds of maps and other geographic data (like POI).
Star Wars
especially when lawyers get involved...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
$100 million to create a fund that generates a $10 million annual budget, with additional donors actively sought - either a blank check, or targeted at a certain subject or language. That kind of money sounds like alot but it isn't enough to buy a single Hollywood movie. It has to be used efficiently and leveraged.
So first, expand the budget. The French will pay for French, China can pay for Chinese. Translations can be made into African languages. Physics, biology, chemistry and computer science can have multiple corporate sponsors, too. So a department that does this full time for pay needs to exist.
Next, what to spend the money on, besides administration, research, and tool building. The answer is not something that can be solved instantaneously. Probably a mix of things would be a good idea to start with.
Perhaps a good thing would be to make a plan with goals to work towards. The original post talks about buying and freeing works, which caused a bunch of posts covering entertainment, primary school and college education, ancient and classical literature libraries, preservation of techniques, and recovery from a disaster. Since the project will likely gain more momentum (blogs, news articles, contributions, additional sponsors) the more people use it, one goal should be to assemble useful and interesting works, not only for the third world (which is a great goal in itself of course) but also things found interesting by educated first worlders who are active on the net. So I would add contemporary fiction too.
Education is something to which people donate a lot of money. In fact I have often heard Harvard has 100 times the endowment of Tokyo University and this makes a massive difference. Get some people who know what they are talking about and find out how to make it possible for people to donate to this thing instead of to a University, and get a tax break.
Next look at what other people have done and what works. Consider working with other projects for a synergy that makes the investments in both our project and theirs more valuable. So for education, take a look at something like MIT OpenCourseware. They have lecture notes and sometimes videos of lectures, assignments, exams, reading lists or tools. They don't grant credits, and I haven't seen any books - not for brain science, electronic circuits, linear algebra, or Intro to linguistics at least.
Also did you know the U.S. Military has a huge series of books for general education? I have seen a list for example of books covering a number of courses in electronics.
So here are some suggestions I have as far as content goes. I'll mention what I might like to see, which is better I think
Contemporary fiction, and science fiction. Out of copyright is okay, though I would like to see at least one book, Robert Heinlein's Friday. Because it talks about a terminal that has access to all the libraries of the world. I would also recommend buying some popular books as a way to get people to come to the site. Maybe a few books a month. Ebook readers will get more popular too. Talk to Tor Books about masters of golden era of science fiction.
Hire book writers. 100 people at $10,000 each is only 1/10 of the budget. Institute a quality control process that compares them to the top books used by universities and aim to beat them. And hire smart people (tm) to write on a certain subject. Not just a rehash.
Survey the books used by top schools and study them, contact authors, and discover what it takes to have a really good author write a really good book. Assign some budget and try to cover various fields, creating a chain from beginner to advanced material so people can actually learn something they don't know. This is important for all age groups and nationalities.
Start a project to try and standardize things so they don't have to be reinvented by each author, and so that materials for different fields, or at least within the chain of a single field, can be linked
Would be better spent lobbying on behalf of the public domain, to fix the insane amount of time that copyrights last. Lets see, you could try to fix the system, or maybe buy a few things, rewarding someone for a broken system.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
I also wonder if you could push this concept to other forms of litterature. Imagine if you could modify anything in the Lord of the Ring or Shakespear's plays, could anything better come out ? I doubt it but it would sure provide for some interesting social experiment. Of course, make sure the original version is just a click away (or less !).
Non-Linux Penguins ?
How much are the rights to the Encyclopaedia Britannica? *ducks*
Although this would be more of a project Gutenberg than a wikipedia thing, they should buy the early editions of textbooks. Many famous texts have 5+ editions, and it might even help sales if the first few editions were available free online.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Anyone remember the Babylon Translator?
It was widely used among German Geeks about 5-10 years ago. (Sadly some years ago it has become a pay-to-use thing) You just had to click on ANY text segment on the screen and it showed you the english/german translation. And it still worked when you weren't online.
I'm not talking about buying the Babylon Translator, but instead of creating a new piece of Software just like it, which this time supports hundreds of languages and comes with full Linux and Mac support.
Dan.
...why not just buy Encyclopedia Britannica? Should silence Wikipedia's critics.
Yes. Use some of the money to set up a kind of auction site, where holders of a particular work can set a price, and bidders can make offers, ideally collectively as in fundable.org. Or the buyers could initiate the purchase. Pretty quickly the "real" value of an unpopular 1940 work will become evident, and it won't be high. Once holders get back to earth about what their work is worth, we can start buying it back, piece by piece.
(I think setting a fixed price per novel is a bad idea - for one thing, the prices you cited are way too high, and feed the holder's delusions)
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
From the Mediawiki page:
While James Brown was in jail, the upcoming rap artists used samples of his works extensively. If you could find some pieces of modern music with such a potential for reuse, that could be great. I wonder, Michael Jackson had the rights for The Beatles music. If he has not resold them yet, could he use 100 million dollars? --The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.20.17.84 (talk contribs) .
IIRC, the value of the catalog was estimated at 250 million in one of the stories about Jackson's deterioriating financial situation.
From Popular music albums/singles with remixable elements under Creative Commoms:
I think some of this cash should go towards buying up a few well-known music albums/singles and releasing them under a Non-Commercial Sampling Plus Creative Commons license. For example, buying up some old rap records (example off the top of my head, Tupac) along with a few rock records (another random example, Nirvana) and allowing DJs and remixers to do what they please with producing mashups, reproductions, covers and so on.
----
Popular music has a high visibility. It would help promote the concept of open access.
Yes of course, don't buy the copyrighted material. I like the idea of lobying for new (fair) copyright laws but I think this is implicitly outside of the range of the offer. So, let's stick with things we can do. Fund the production of quality etextbooks in all of the major fields (and yes we're including music, art and the like) for all of the levels of eduction pre-uni/college. We could even try to split it up according to country and language by the number of current wiki entries for each language (meaning, we would try to make an effort to involve all of the languages of Wikipedia and decrease our bias to do it all in English). This of course leaves open the not insignificant question of the selection of the authors for said entries and attempting to find true "authorities" on the topics who are also good at communicating their knowledge in writing, etc., etc. Ideas on solved the said problem welcome. I'm going to second the suggestion to include lectures on topics and raise it to support any sort of multi-media collaborations that work towards the promotion of education (videos are cool in that they could simply be dubbed in different languages using the original footage for all of them). The great thing about a wiki is that it is editable. With a large support base these coursebooks should remain up to date. The foundation is of course important, but there is nothing but room for growth upon that. Actually, the larger the support base of qualified teachers and educators working with the texts day in and day out should lead to an extremely polished set of materials. But do we need to start worrying about homogeneity then? Perhaps we should separated the very notion of "textbook" into smaller modules of learning on certain topics. I can imagine how a textbook for English literature would be served by allowing for an individual teacher to select certain material of his own interest/knowledge or that fell in line with the particular school district's plan, etc. I think this could help in many courses and emphasise the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge in the internet age. Things like history, art, literature, and, yes, even science and medicine, are all interrelated and should be allowed at least some room to venture into each other's territory. I think the promotion of science is laudable, but we've got bigger fish to fry here (meaning, let's think about EVERYBODY). Not everyone who goes to wikipedia is a slashdot reader :)
My last word and a pet peeve: it's Finnegans Wake (no apostrophe please!!)
Buy out the rights to several decades of HS and College Course books.... say one set per decade starting in 1930 or so. Put them online both for students and hobbyists who'd like to get access to standard texts on subjects. Additionally it would be very interesting to see the evolution of knowledge over the last several decades. One more thought... don't limit it to English... let's see what the Europeans, Japanese, etc. have been learning over the last few decades as well.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Dream a little...
Recently we have seen a flood of publicly available satellite imagery on the web and this has greatly improved the possibilities of small NGO's and local communities to improve their lives - who couldn't otherwise afford expensive geographic information services. Unfortunately infrastucture projects such as roads, bridges, agricultural and water works all need accurate elevation data rather than fancy looking satellite imagines. Areas with no existing infrastucture could be provided for examaple with modern telecommunications using low-cost radiolinks if the topography of the area was known well. Things like irrigation and flood prevention could be planned by volunteers if such data was freely available. Maps, aerial photos and satellites images get old very quickly and thus are a waste of limited resources. Topographic information does not change in centuries and would thus make a valuable one time investment for our global community.
Geographic information services (GIS) typically utilize a digital elevation model (DEM) datasets which define a grid of elevation values over an area. On top of this one is then able to lay down a map or image of any type using free publicly available software and perform calculations in three dimentions typically involved in civil-engineering. Currently the only publicly available global DEM is the GTOPO30 compiled during 1993-95 by an internation efford involving USGS, NASA and UNEP among others. GTOPO30 is a global 30-arc-second grid (rougly 1 kilometer squared) with a mean accuracy of about +-30 meters in elevation but in many poor areas of the world much worse than this. This is way too rough for most practical applications. More accurate datasets are commercial and extremely expensive or simply impossible to obtain.
Much more accurate data should be available from numerous recently launched satellite systems by government agencies (NASA, ESA, JAXA) as well as commercial satellite vendors (DigitalGlobe, Geoeye, Spot). If the right people would just talk to other right people, the whole thing could be handled without exchange of huge monetary commitments. Selling elevation data for these companies isn't a huge cash cow due to the longevity of the datasets ones sold.
USGS hosted GTOPO30:o po30.html
http://edc.usgs.gov/products/elevation/gtopo30/gt
USGS Full specification of GTOPO30:A DME.html
http://edc.usgs.gov/products/elevation/gtopo30/RE
Sincerely
Miikka Raninen
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
I am tired of thinking for myself all the time, can't everyone else just edit what's in my head?
Mining the Sky - by John Lewis The premier book on asteroid mining is now sadly out of date with recent developments in asteroid exploration - it holds absurdly low estimates on near earth asteroid population, and doesn't include the results of the latest research and space probes (such as deep impact).
This book would benefit greatly from being turned into a wiki.
...Wiki Constitution.
In high school, I bought a cheapo $20 Barnes & Noble brand "Complete Works." I wound up being a theater major and a member of my campus Shakespeare Ensemble, and discovered that this version was a total waste of my money. I've since bought many of the plays in well-edited versions for $8-10 each, and I would never go back to the crappily-edited "cheap public domain" versions. (That's not to say I wouldn't like a complete works with all the original editions of all the plays - but mostly for curiosity's sake. If you're going to perform them, you're either going to want a well-edited version or have a specific reason for using a specific original version.)
And, of course, once an editor has done their job, the result is copyrighted.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Why games? Let's buy some useful software. There have been many useful programs that were discontinued, for some reason or another.
- Lotus Improv -- the greatest spreadsheet, until it was axed
- HyperCard -- it's dead, but some people really loved it for what it could do
- Mac OS (prior to X) -- Apple thinks it's dead (funeral and all) so let's let people play with it, port it to new systems, whatever
- A high-quality SmallTalk implementation -- VisualWorks? (I don't know if there's any that's old enough to be cheap but better than the current free ones.)
- some embedded development environment -- many/most of the embedded development systems are really only useful with a commercial development environment, though they tend to be (a) expensive, and (b) sucky; let's open-source a couple of them, and see what happens
What cool (non-game) abandonware needs to be freed?
There is simply no reason for the textbook publishing industry to continue to exist.
For people who still needs paper copies, Kinko's can fill that void.
Every academic discipline should create a repository of open-source texts that teachers can choose from.
This is particularly important at the elementary and secondary level, where some districts face a dire shortage of funds.
There is certainly no excuse for any government-run school to purchase any more royalty-encumbered textbooks. The phase-in to open-source needs to start now.
What the hell is our objective? We want to free works, but we have not said what we will use them for. Possibilities include:
* An OLPC style educational computer (text books)
* Evidence for future legal action (Microsoft's Source Code)
* Scientific research (journals, databases)
* Getting rid of nuisances (e.g., the assasination of Mickey Mouse)
* Conventional History (photos, speeches)
* Pop Culture (songs, TV, magazines)
* Data needed for maintenance (schematics, manuals)
* Entertainment (PC Games)
* Standards (ISO, IEEE, SAE)
* Emulators (ROMs for ATARIs, etc.)
Andy Out!
Get the rights before the pharma-corps make them intellectual property. I'd like life extension, cures for cancer and the like to be in the public domain, not $100,000 per use.
Why does it need to be a written work?
The most widely known piece of music in the English speaking world is "Happy Birthday to You"...
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp
To make the most out of a single large gift to humanity, it should be something that effects everyone. Thus other IP owners can be influenced. Maybe the credits of commercial works could be required to cite the public license and a statement to encourage other works to be released.
Doing the "The Happy Birthday Song" together with a broader set of serious works (textbooks etc..) will get the attention of the whole populace. Thus be more likely to kick off a chain reaction.
Ross
However, it appears they make quite a bit of money from selling access online, so it's doubtful it would be cost effective to acquire any of these. Often you have to pony up a significant subscription fee to have access, and not everyone can justify that for a periodic interest in researching some subject (or fixing an old piece of gear).
Then again, such things may be the main thing that will eventually keep brick-and-mortar libraries alive. I can still go into the library and check these things out if I don't want to pay for online access...
worth of pr0n!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
And I'm not even going to think about what happens if the world loses the ability to "read". We should at least be storing an equivalent to the Rosetta Stone somewhere on this blasted rock we call earth. At least that way if the world goes caveman again it will have a way to get back out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flos_Duellatorum
The Getty museum refuses to allow high-res scans of the 15th-century manuscript, preferring instead to license it to publishers. The Getty copy is arguably the most important of the two known, and their stranglehold on these 600 year old illustrations is hobbling the growing community of folks who are working to learn historically accurate swordplay.
I agree that we really need to spend more time and resources on making sure that old news reels and media are preserved. Most of us have seen the first few seconds of new footage from the moon landing, but if we were not old enough to witness it in person, many of us have never seen any of the other amazing footage from the moon landings. Now that we can't rely on NASA to keep track of that footage, I think it is a great time for us to put forward our time and money into making it availible on the internet for future generations to enjoy. And what better place to store it than Wikipedia.
What about old sports footage? All the footage of the greatest olympic stars? All those infamous football games? Opening up that footage to Wikipeida would make a great addition.
If Apple really had nothing against free formats, then the iPod and iTunes would play Ogg Vorbis, Theora, and FLAC formats. I know that some of the current iPods are capable of doing Vorbis and FLAC so why don't they add the feature as part of the next bi-monthly iPod Updater.
As for iTunes? Well there is no excuse for them not to officially include support. They could even just use this package if they are lazy. I honestly don't see why they don't officially include it. I mean there was a recent update for Garage Band that was 25MB just to include support for Aperature 1.5; can't iTunes have another 1.6MB of somewhat useful bloat?
Apple, I and many other people are your market for the iTV. Make sure that you include support for free codecs.
Take the main course of Elementary to College books necessary and buy up a decent version of English, Math, General Science, and whatever others are popular and on budget.
Universities could then make part of the education professorship, to add to the WikiUniversity.
A big expense of students and schools is books -- why the government doesn't enlist the aide of Universities to supply them -- well that is an entire blog in itself. The idea that Math and English need the "new" $100 book to replace the old one is silly, but Wikipedia could go a long way to FREE cash-strapped schools from the tyranny of "closed-market" educational books.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
To extend the GP's point--yes that is all true, but is that necessarily the best way to do things? Of all the things you've listed, the only things that are truly required from the point of view of the science are peer review and publication. Editors and typesetting are relics left over from the time when printed journals were the only way to mass communicate, and your high page charges pay for their overhead.
Neither would be required in an online, automated system. Papers could be distributed to referees, and comments relayed back to authors, by algorithms. You would still need editors, but their job demands would be reduced. They would qualify new referees and properly characterizing them in the system, so they receive papers in their areas of expertise. And they would review disputes raised by the community.
$100 million would pay for a lot of staff, software development, and referee fees. This is doubly true if the $100 million is used as seed money to start a non-profit business. Certainly the cost structure would a lot lower, resulting in much lower page fees. Public access could be granted for free or a very low cost, perhaps subsidized by foundations.
From the 30,000 foot view, science is run a lot like a wiki, but with pre-screened participants and formal processes for posting updates to the general knowledge. There's no reason that structure could not be directly expressed online, without the legacy print journals.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think what this debate shows is that even the large sum proposed is a drop in the ocean compared to the monetary value of commercial copyright.
I would suggest that moneys used to reserve works for public access would be better spent freeing stuff that has become social archetypes, famous newsreel footage, songs (such as happy birthday) that people are often suprised to find are still in copyright and core systems standards (such as the core APIs of various commercial operating systems, while still protecting the proprietory front-end.)
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
How about buying the secrets of the ufo phenomena from the government.
I was figuring that the "price" for a novel would require that it be submitted in digital form, so that's why I was thinking something like $50; having the rights to $RANDOM_NOVEL isn't worth much until you have that novel typed in and stored in a database somewhere. I'd offer to buy both the rights and a digital copy of the work in a package, requiring a larger payout, but probably less than the cost of having to do the digitization yourself.
So while the rights to something might be worth very little, the rights plus a digitized copy in some sort of standard format (straight ASCII, etc.) might well be worth considerably more.
But you're right, it would be good to find some way of establishing the "market price" of such old works, and then if offering that didn't bring in many submissions, tacking on a few dollars to encourage people to go to the effort of going through their attic for an old manuscript and typing it all in.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I appreciate your need to be understood, but the more you add to this discussion, the more you reveal the breadth of your misunderstanding of copyright law. For instance, copyrights are not held by publishers, but by authors. This is a well-settled tenet of copyright law. Read this if you're in disbelief. What's the problem here? It's that the original authors are long-since dead and the copyright has long since run out. Under those conditions, nobody has a copyright to the works--they are part of the public domain.
You may be confused here because the "editor" of a 400 year old work is not necessarily just chopping up and rearranging the original text, but is also making meaningful changes to it (mostly additions, i.e. is an author in his/her own right). As I said earlier, those additions are subject to copyright in the re-published works in which they appear. Again, this is well-settled law. Consult Section 103(b) of the Code for more information. Here's the text of it:
Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. You go on:
Again, you're close but not at all accurate here. You sound like one of those people who has gotten their head all mixed up about licensing and copyright issues by reading the postings of Slashdot's myriad C++ programmers and 14 year-olds who themselves don't understand copyright laws. I hold those people 100% responsible for your confusion over compilation copyrights. ("You can't license something you can't own" and so on).
Gutenberg's act of reproducing a work on their site does not create a copyright to the individual work at all (again, consult the explicit language of the U.S. law on the subject in section 103(b) of the U.S. Code). They have no copyright notices on their works because they they would be breaking the law if they did--they don't and never have owned the rights to any of the works on their site.
Go pick up a compilation of any short stories in printed form where the stories are in the public domain. Do you see how there are no copyright notices at the beginning of each story? Do you see how they're all at the very front of the book? That's because the only thing that's copyrighted is the COLLECTION itself--the act of pulling the stories together into one cohesive book and creating something new in the process--not the stories themselves. You see, the only thing new that
Oh yes, as a side-note, I should probably point out that Gutenberg more than likely did not consult with a good attorney before drafting their licensing agreement. Otherwise, the agreement would not relinquish certain rights to the works that Gutenberg themselves did not have anyway, or in other paragraphs impose a number of restrictions on the use of the works that Gutenberg themselves cannot legally impose. It may be that Gutenberg is simply trying to create a broad-reaching agreement that can be applicable in other countries. However, the lack of correspondence between the language in their pseudo-license and established U.S. copyright law is very conspicuous.
The "Wiki" nature of the site combined with the categorically stupid "free as in X, not free as in Y" rhetoric on their site leads me to believe that many non-lawyers were involved in the creation of the agreement and the site where it can be accessed. It is no wonder that people are so confused over copyright issues, when they detrimentally rely on bad information.
But it says that this product qualifies for free shipping! So that can't be right.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.