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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'd like to see some stuff like repair manuals for cars, exloded parts drawings, etc. That stuff can be hard to find sometimes, as its always copywrited. How would this work though, if they buy copywrited material is it just OK for them to post it up for free for everyone?" They would be buying the copywrights, not juse a copywrighted work. Once they own the copywrights, then they control the work. So then they can post it up in it's entirety for the rest of the world to enjoy and learn from.
Happy Puppy User
No, they aren't. The texts of those works derived from manuscripts--in series like the Teubner texts or the Oxford Classical Texts--are often still under copyright, and many translations into English are still copyright. One is either dependent on Victorian-era stuff, or one has to translate the material himself (and distribute only the translation, since the text may be copyright).
The translations aren't. For out-of-copyright versions, you still have to go back to versions published a century ago, where the translations are uniformly full of "thou"s and "thee"s and written in bad verse more incomprehensible than the original languages. In fact even modern critical editions of the texts in their original languages are under copyright.
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.
The most popular English translations of ye olde publishing standbye - The Holy Bible - are covered by copyright in various jurisdictions. The Revised Standard Version and New International Version (two pillars of the modern English market) are both new enough to be under copyright, as are all of the heavily-paraphrased versions (e.g. Living Bible). Even the King James Version is under crown copyright in the UK. The most "modern" translations in the Public Domain are generally deprecated versions such as the (un-Revised) American Standard Version.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.