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?

Comments

The Penguin Classics Library

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Extide]

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?

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Sun Tzu, Chaucer-- yeah, I think a few of those might be off copyright already.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[AuMatar]

Don't worry, Disney's trying to fix that.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Anonymous Coward]

Textbooks is a really great idea. Currently I have to spend a lot of money on course books and I imagine there are lots of people that cant spend this kind of money on books (forexample, someone in africa). So free high-quality "mother of all" "books" in all possible fields/subjects is very important! Some kind of "complete collection of all human knowledge"-webpage. Released on the internet, with space for discussions next to each chapter (where visitors can help eachother understand the subject), wiki-articles on each chapter with FAQ:s, etc, translations done by the community, etc.

Something else to go with these "books" would be high quality lectures by some of the best lecturers in respective field.

Free "books" and lectures would allow anyone anywhere, that just have access to the internet, to learn whatever he/she want.

(Another wish would be to "liberate" all papers ever written and put those on a nice website)

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[BostonVaulter]

"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.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[CRCulver]

Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Sun Tzu, Chaucer-- yeah, I think a few of those might be off copyright already.

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).

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Petrushka]

Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Sun Tzu, Chaucer-- yeah, I think a few of those might be off copyright already.

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.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[ssyladin]

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.

Here here! I'm sick and tired of seeing editions 7 through 15 of the same calculus book, where the only "improvement" are the renumbering of the problems in a section, and maybe a few new ones. This subject matter is so standardized by now that there is no reason to charge the public school system or 1st year college students $105 for a textbook that gets forcibly outdated so the publisher can make more money.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Instine]

These are great ideas (though I don't like the US bias :| ). But! $100M is a lot of money. It'll earn you a lot of annual interest. And academic books become dated quickly. Wouln't it be wize to buy updated copy each year, than as much as you possibly could all at once?

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[tverbeek]

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.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[bcnstony]

Given the state of the US Healthcare system, where politicians suggest that 'the market' should determine whether granny gets her operation or not, I think we should have a How-To series of books on medical treatment. Is your appendix flaring up? That would be no. 17. Tonsils? Tricky, but do-able. That gets lumped in with Tracheotomies (no. 26). A few in the series would be devoted to cancer, such as no. 82: Using Home Cleaning Products as Chemotherapy Agents (includes coupon for Drano) or no. 156B, Power Tools Helpful for Removing Non-Invasive Tumors (coupon for Home Depot included).

Politics would inevitably creep in, unfortunately, renaming Preventing Unwanted Pregnancies to Dammit, Abstinence till Marriage, you slut! and replacing Avoiding High-Calorie Low-Nutrition Foods to Happy Meals Forever!

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[AuMatar]

No they don't. Calculus hasn't changed much in the past 20 years. Neither has basic college physics. Or chemistry. The really advanced stuff, yes. The bachellors level stuff, not really.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Anonymous Coward]

Set up a holding company to buy shares in Disney and hold proxies for like-minded people who buy shares in Disney. Then change Disney's policies to be U.S. Constitution friendly with respect to copyright. That is, have Disney pay off the politicians to stop extending copyright and instead do the opposite.

I would guess each year of "copyrighted" works from 1920's on holds a value in excess of $100 Million to society. It is time society got its purchase back (we paid for those copyrights to be enforced for over half a century). Getting the law changed to stop extending copyrights (unconstitutionally) would be a very good return on a $100 million investment.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Instine]

You have a pedantic but note worthy point. yes it would be wasteful to do this, annually, for each field, without thought for the relevance of doing so. But to be equally pedantic, I'd disagree about physics. Its has actually changed a great deal, year on year, for as long as I've been paying it attention (20ish years). Even at bachellor level. At least thats the case here. Maths not so much though. You're right enough there. Chemistry likewise.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Satorian]

Good recommendations!

Additionally, I'd love to see the Very Short Introduction series by the Oxford University Press. I think they would be perfect for Wikipedia as extended content on major topics.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[jwkane]

Anyone that won't at least give it fundamental extrememly influential historical document status isn't rational. Troll is a fair mod.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[alerante]

There's a current attempt at a public domain Bible, the World English Bible. The New Testament is considered complete by the editors.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[kkwst2]

I would argue that basic physics (for instance, the first three semesters at college) has changed very little over the last 20 years. Certainly the basics of mechanics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics has changed very little. The more esoteric topics such as string theory have advanced, but they have very little relevance to anyone except academics in physics.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[theskipper]

Thanks, guys. Now I can't remember how to spell the word.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[BostonVaulter]

"Free "books" and lectures would allow anyone anywhere, that just have access to the internet, to learn whatever he/she want." OCW may be what you are looking for. Although I must admit that it is quite technical.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Jahz]

These are great ideas (though I don't like the US bias :| ). But! $100M is a lot of money. It'll earn you a lot of annual interest. And academic books become dated quickly. Wouln't it be wize to buy updated copy each year, than as much as you possibly could all at once?

Not really... Yes, academic books are constant being revised, but the information is generally VERY static. The publishers like to reorder chapters, question, etc so that poor university students like me have to purchase "new" versions of the same textbook (a reaction to half.com and general book resale).

History texts change when our interpretation of the past changes. Anatomy and other various medical texts change as our understand of ourselves evolves. Examples of things that don't change all that often: An intro to physics textbook, a calculus textbook (math laws are fairly sound...), Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language, etc....

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[rolfwind]

Which kind of reminds me, instead of purchasing works directly, this could a several magnitudes of an order more free stuff if the guy decides to "purchase" a few key senators and representatives to fix some of that legislation Disney&Co have pushed through over the years.....

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[nanio]

Well, Disney's market cap is $67+ billion. Kinda hard to buy influence there.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[westlake]

~$8k on Amazon so the copyrights are probably worth a lot but I think that a lot of these titles are public domain...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.

There is an old rule of thumb that a classic has to be re-translated and re-introduced in every generation to remain inviting and accesible to the student and general reader. Preserving the original texts is a trival problem in comparison.

If you know Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare only as assigned English reading you'll recognize the truth of this.

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.

The truths about Disney that the Geek ignores is that the Disney archives remain intact and the Disney product remains accessible and to affordable. You want Bambi in pristine digital restoration? You'll find it at your corner drugstore selling for under $20.

Bambi was filmed in three-strip technicolor. The matte paintings on glass survive. The pencil tests survive. Steamboat Willie was distributed on unstable nitrate stock with synchronized sound on phonographic disks. Conservation costs money. Restoration costs money.

The skills required are rare and demanding.

But you don't need Big Daddy Warbucks to "rescue" Mickey Mouse. The Mouse is still on stage.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[LindseyJ]

I could say the same about pretty much anything:

Then do yourself a favour if you're such a moderate, sensible Muslim - do something, or at least pretend to do something about the crazies who give you a bad name. Then we'll talk.

Then do yourself a favour if you're such a moderate, sensible white person - do something, or at least pretend to do something about the crazies who give you a bad name. Then we'll talk.

Then do yourself a favour if you're such a moderate, sensible Republican - do something, or at least pretend to do something about the crazies who give you a bad name. Then we'll talk.

Why is it that Christianity gets singled out? I myself have personally protested Landover Baptist's extreme (and often cannonically incorrect) views. Can we talk now? I'm not sure what else you want me, as a normal, everyday Christian person to do. As long as they're in America, they have as much right to say that "God hates queers" as the KKK does to say "We hate niggers" or the talk radioheads have to say "Democratz = teh evilz" or any other religion or ideology has to preach anything else under the law.

I don't have to like that the Crusades killed millions for the sake of misguided politics under the guise of religion. Nor do I have to like that Landover Baptist protests the funerals of murdered Amish schoolgirls. But neither of them has anything to do with me, any more than GW Bush's foriegn policy has to do with any average Joe American.

I honestly don't see where the blanket Christian hatred comes from, while people preach at us to not judge Muslims (as an example) by the actions of a relatively few radical minority.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[kubrick]

I myself have personally protested Landover Baptist's extreme (and often cannonically incorrect) views.

Nor do I have to like that Landover Baptist protests the funerals of murdered Amish schoolgirls.

Um, Landover Baptist is satire. You're thinking of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Ratbert42]

$100m buys a lot of killer trees.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[slashkitty]

autozone.com has a good set of repair manuals online. Sometimes a little hard to navigate, but, I'm guessing the copyright isn't that $$?

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[operagost]

Just in case anyone is confused, keep in mind that Mickey Mouse is a trademark of Disney and allowing Steamboat Willie to lapse into the public domain doesn't allow others to use Mickey Mouse's image. It would allow people to produce and distribute copies of "Steamboat Willie" freely. So you could sell DVDs but Disney could still sell you for using images of Mickey on a website or T-shirt.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[AuMatar]

Computer science, is the prime example of a field whose books would be out of date each year.

Umm, computer science is not out of date every year. The seminal books in CS are all over a decade old. Some are close to 20 or 30 years (a few of these have new editions, but those are jsut to make money. Having compared the two versions of several, nothing has changed but problems, grammar tweaks, and page numbers). Programming languages change, but the basics of programming (functions, boolean logic, loops, recursion, functions) remain the same. OSes change, but the ideas they deal with (synchronization, scheduling, semaphores, mutexes, file system access, etc) remain the same. Discrete math is the same it was 2 decades ago, we just know a few more things. Same for pretty much every other field of CS I can think of. In reality, there's very few new ideas or concepts in CS- most of the big new ideas are old ideas recycled, because changes in how we do use computers or changes in hardware speeds have made them viable again. Sure, APIs will change, but if your CS program is teaching APIs instead of concepts you need to *RUN* away from that program.

Re physics being stationary, no. Just ain't so. Maybe first year stuff (freshman I guess you call it).

More than just the freshman stuff. Maxwells laws haven't changed, and advanced courses on EM are 3rd year courses for most EEs. Neither has the workings of semiconductors on a quantum mechanical level, and thats a 3rd/4th year course for EEs. Sure, we've learned more and gained a few new fields, but its mainly tweaks on old theories. I'm a bit above my head in knowing whats changed for a 4th year physics student, but I know that from what I learned in my EE and CS courses, we could have had 30 year old books for the EE and 20 for the CS with no loss of information. Now graduate level would need more frequent updates, but a good chunk of grad level learning isn't text books- its reading articles and journals. Its not that you never need to review the books and see if new stuff needs adding, but once a decade or so is more than sufficient. Once a year is just wasteful.

Re:The Penguin Classics Library

[Sandor at the Zoo]

I would much rather use a fund like this to bring back into print stuff that isn't available.

Penguin books and car-repair books you can find in any bookstore, or Amazon.

What I'd like to see is all the old, good science fiction from the 1930s through the 1980s bought up and made available again.

A lot of this stuff is still in copyright, but not in print for decades. In some cases, the author is dead, the estate is either up in the air, doesn't know they have rights to titles, or doesn't care.

That's the kind of stuff that I don't want to just disappear as the years go by. Penguin classics will always be around. Good SF won't.

OK, include other types of fiction if you want. And even non-fiction, I guess. :-)

How about the original Mickey Mouse cartoon?

[jZnat]

Maybe without that incentive, Disney will stop lobbying for copyright extensions? That way we can actually make use of all this material again.

Re:How about the original Mickey Mouse cartoon?

[Have Blue]

I kinda doubt Disney would part with that particular work for any finite amount of money.

Book one.

[TheSHAD0W]

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?

Well

[Quick Sick Nick]

A history of Pornography would be very informative.

Re:Well

[klack]

In HTML with pictures, or plain text?

Re:Well

[maxwell demon]

ASCII art, of course!

Use the money to generate new works

[Marcion]

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.

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[supabeast!]

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.

Why assume that anything produced under such a scheme would be any good? It makes a lot more sense to buy existing works known to be worth the money than it does to spend it commissioning work that may very well not be worth anything to anyone by the time it's finished.

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[Propaganda13]

I've got an idea for a new work that would require vast community input. I call it Rebuild the World project AKA In Case of Disaster. The idea is that you start with nothing (no tools, etc.) and bring the technology level back up to 1940's(or up to current levels). I'm talking everything from simple tools and shelters to finding ore and refining it to making automobiles and radios. The idea is way too big for one person to do.

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! then we'd check wikipedia in how to rebuild the world and... wait...

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[zytheran]

As an engineer I am increasingly concerned about our loss of basic knowledge that is kept in non-electronic form.
How many people could actually make a working windmill, water wheel or atmospheric engine to kick start any sort of failed society?
How did we mine basic ores, make good charcoal and smelt them into metal?
How did our first carts and harnesses work?
How does one craft rock by hand?
What about the basics of farming? Most people in the west now live in cities and have no clue about food production.

This information needs recording permanently.

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[aethera]

You've basically described my plan to keep myself busy post-retirement. I'd like to start with nothing but some land and some flint and see how far I could get, creating stone tools, creating rope, digging and refining tools for copper and iron implements, cutting and dressing millstones, creating a waterwheel and using it to power a sawmill, etc etc. Basically building furniture and implements along the way as they would have been made with each period's technology. My end goal is to be able to build a small house and create basic but refined furniture all using hammers, saws et al. completely of my own manufacture.

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[mlinksva]

Strongly agree. Don't give money to the copyright industry. $100m could fund a huge amount of new and improved free culture and free software. Hopefully this would also make old copyrights less valuable and more easily purchased later. :)

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[Propaganda13]

The project would just be on the internet for contributing to the project then distribution to the whole world. Under an open license, the project could be printed out by yourself or publishers for hard copies that would be more disaster resistant.

Not everyone could be taught how to build or do everything in the project, but it would be a reference. How many people would be able to make a metal fork from scratch right now? (Most everyone would be using chopsticks or carved wooden forks) I can make a mold and cast, but would have no idea on how to find the ore.

How much do they learn by it? A lot more than most people do now since they'd be starting from nothing and building an industrial base within their lifetime. They also might have knowledge of every step of building an item like a radio from ore to the finished project.

I do think people would improve on it. You'd follow instructions and make then be like "why didn't they do it this way instead"

It is pointing them in a certain direction. What's your preference - building a metal bicycle from scratch in 20-30 years or 2000 years or more to come up with some equivalent idea(assuming the group doesn't die off in the first few years)

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[Propaganda13]

Disasters come in all forms. EMPs could wipe all computer chips then your machines that build computer chips or other machines would be useless. Nuclear blasts could irradiate all major industrial areas. World flooding could drive the population to high ground leaving the industrial areas under hundreds of feet of ocean.

Hardcopies or OLPC could bring this info to areas of the world that are not up to current technology levels. This would might help them improve life even if their technology level remains 50-100 years behind the First World countries.

It's not a fix for all problems, but it is a tool that could be helpful.

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[Tesla Tank]

A fellow engineer friend and I were talking about this actually. We were dreaming about somehow being brought back in time, and we could use that opportunity to teach everyone the technologies in the modern world. But we soon realized that despite being generally more knowledged than the public, we still had no idea how most things work in the modern society. We knew how things work theoretically and could apply some of that theory, in our respective fields, industrial and electrical engineering. However, I wouldn't be able to help them with designing a city for example. All the sewage systems, gas pipes, eletrical grid, zoning practices, the list goes on. So it's definitely a great idea to record most of the technological progress we've made in the past few millennium, both in electrical and hardcopy form.

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree generally with your premise (ie, that we are woefully unprepared for any sort of deep technological catastrophe), however it must be understood that knowledge is dynamic and our forms of recording it are not completely effective. For instance, to learn to farm using only primitive methods or to smelt metal requires apprenticeship under experienced persons. These methods were developed over long periods of time and can't be transmitted succinctly or easily in written form. Similarly, various martial arts and certain religious traditions have been transmitted person-to-person through thousands of years because writing systems cannot adequately convey the concepts involved.

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[zippthorne]

An aircraft? well I guess for a class, since they're usually pretty small, it's a good idea, especially if you actually build one. But it'd probably be better to build a sloop in the real situation. Small enough to build in a sand-pit drydock, large enough to hold substantial supplies, and forgiving enough that your lack of computer analysis won't doom the trip to certain failure halfway to the middle of the ocean parallel to the coast you were trying to aim for.

Plus you don't have to figure out how to cast or mill a lightweight engine using ore of unknown quality and coarse sand.

What universidy btw?

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[chris_eineke]

You're kidding, right? You, sir, are an economic terrorist. You deprive honest business men of your well-earned money by building tools yourself. How could you even think of doing something like that, you ignorant prick? These people need money to survive and you're just sitting there, handcrafting your own beautiful, precision instruments for yourself?

I am enraged! I feel ashamed for you! I must introduce a Bill to address this unmorality. And I will call it the "Aethera Act." From now on, no one shall be able to produce something, anything, from his own hands if he hasn't gotten the necessary skill to do so. I've already schmoozed my congressbuddies. You'll see, aethera. Your time for hippy, hanky-panky, communistic Free Craftsmanship will be over, I say. OVER!

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you should worry about the information in non-electronic form. I think we'll find it more difficult to access information that is stored in electronic form than non-electronic if we forget how mine basic ores!

Re:Use the money to generate new works

[morethanapapercert]

Just where are you going to find a piece of land that has all the needed materials?
1) Natural deposits of flint are rare and hard to find in North America, the best deposits I've heard of are in northern Europe.
    1a) I'm a SCAdian, with a serious interest in history, I've tried flint knapping. It's one of of those things where, if you have an expert to teach you, you can pick up the basics in an afternoon. If you don't have an expert on hand, you'll spend weeks driving yourself nuts, cutting your hands to ribbons and making an awful lot of useless fragments. Making fire with flint requires a steel, something you apparently have ruled out bringing in with you.
2) I am not a geologist, but it seems to me that finding one tract of land that has both bornite (or cuprite I suppose) and an accessible deposit of magnetite (one of the easier iron ores for laymen to find and separate) *and* a supply of good quality limestone for the millwheel is next to impossible. Finding such a site where the deposits are accessible to one man digging with stone age tools would be even harder. (our ancestors grabbed up a lot of the easily accessible stuff, which is why we are digging so deep today)
3) Again calling on my SCAdian background, I happen to know that making even a simple quern is a major challenge, not all types of limestone have the right "grain" or texture to make a good grinding surface. Some are pretty friable, meaning you get grit in everything you grind in it. Granite is pretty much out of the question, at least for the first few years, since to work stone effectively, you need tools that are at least as hard as the stone you are working on.
4) Starting out with just some flint and presumably the clothes on your back? I hope you are living in SoCal or somewhere else warm, else you could well freeze to death before you get weather proof shelter. Building your own house should not be your last goal, it should be your third! Anyone who has taken any kind of survival training, even a boyscout, could tell you the big three are fire, food and shelter.
5) For one man trying to make his own rope, the obvious recommendation is hemp. But if you do try to grow it, keep your eyes out for DEA choppers ;)

  For most of human history, the average life span of a male was in the late 30's, lack of medicines accounts for a LOT of that, but not all. Some of it was due to the simple physical demands of living back then. Presumably you are planning to do this in your 50's or 60's since you want to do this after you retire. Are you up to the physical work load?

Open content GIS data

[Anonymous Coward]

Open content GIS data from around the world. It would make developing the next generation of location aware devices/webpages a reality

Re:Open content GIS data

[briancnorton]

100m is a drop in the bucket for geodata. I have seen plenty of data sets of small areas for $1mil plus. That doesn't go very far.

Text books of course

[Zocalo]

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.

How about one book per academic subject

[abradsn]

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.

Re:How about one book per academic subject

[MagicDude]

While an interesting idea, you have to wonder how much of these books will be outdated in 10 or 20 years, espically ones relating to rapidly evolving fields like computer science. While I don't want to say that making current events and scientific theories isn't important, one has to wonder whether there are better uses for the money that will be more lasting, like in making literature or music free of copyrights.

Re:How about one book per academic subject

[BlueItalian]

One of the greatest italian poets of all times, Giacomo Leopardi, achieved a perfect command of latin and greek just out of self study. Universities are greatly overestimated as knowledge source, even with the best professors, most of your knowledge always comes from self-study.

Need you ask?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Need you ask?

[kfg]

With this funding, I believe that we may at long last be able to open-source Natalie Portman.

And the prospect alone would probably petrify her.

KFG

GIS + sat. images

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

james bond bad guy radar

[v1]

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.

Re:Entertainment as well as education

[Watson Ladd]

Shakespere is public domain.

How about some software?

[bdesham]

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.

Re:How about some software?

[BrokenSegue]

A solution to your troubles is already in the works and thus the money can be safely placed elsewhere. Currently the developers are working on an embedded-media implementation of ogg theora. You can read more about the development effort at media-wiki.

Re:How about some software?

[fieldmethods]

Why should Wikimedia invest in extensions to iTunes to support free formats? Apple doesn't _like_ free formats. So what guarantee is there that such extensions would have a shelf life at all?

Media is a pain in the ass on every platform. Linux users cringe every time they see a Quicktime file, a Flash file, etc, etc, etc.

Given that state of affairs, it doesn't make sense for an organization that supports freeing information to invest in software from a company that's exacerbating the problem in the first place.

Periodicals and auto tech manuals

[cygtoad]

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.

Dictionaries

[Laz10]

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.

Re:Dictionaries

[Anonymous Coward]

I bring to you:
http://www.wiktionary.org/

What a waste! Buy an existing base.

[xtal]

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.

Re:What a waste! Buy an existing base.

[bitt3n]

the base mathematics has not changed in many years.

putting the math textbooks on wikipedia would solve that problem rather quickly.

Re:What a waste! Buy an existing base.

[StikyPad]

It's too late. They're already claiming that (0.999... = 1)!!! Anyone with eyes can see this is clearly not the case. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to undo some vandalism. These guys are determined to keep replacing my != with =.

Lawyers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists

[mcelrath]

First, $100M will buy a lot of lawyers, lobbyists, and bureaucrats. These people should then work with congress to return our copyright system to a reasonable state, with a functioning public domain. If the media on which works are recorded is degraded by the time they enter the public domain, then the public domain does not exist in any functional sense. Buying the works themselves within a broken system is only a short-term band-aid and would only work as long as there is money for it. Entering the public domain should be automatic for any work that is not being sold anymore by the copyright holder, or whose copyright holder has died. But in case the person with money doesn't like lawyers or congress, here are some other ideas:

1. The Lexis Nexis database
2. 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.

-- Bob

Re:Lawyers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists

[StupendousMan]

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.

When "the public" pays me to referee papers by other astronomers, and "the public" pays the page charges for the papers I write ($110 per page, by the way), and "the public" pays the editors and typesetters of the journals, then "the public" might assert a right to those papers.

Just to forestall the inevitable responses, no, the federal government is not paying my salary, and no, it hasn't paid for the page charges of my most recent publications. The NSF and NASA do support a great deal of research in astronomy, of course, and grants from those agencies do pay for good fraction of the publications in this area.

On second thought, almost all recent work in astronomy and physics is freely available to public at the LANL preprint archive site, so maybe this whole discussion is moot....

Re:Lawyers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists

[Achromatic1978]

The Lexis Nexis database

Nice try. But I don't think you're aware of how much Lexis Nexis is worth. It dumps nigh on THREE BILLION /every year/ in revenue to its parent, Reed Elsevier (http://www.reed-elsevier.com/media/pdf/t/2/RE_Int erim_FINAL_27July06.pdf) - I suspect they'd get an offer of $100M for copyright to their database and, well, laugh...

Re:Lawyers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists

[StupendousMan]

If it weren't for the huge federal investment in research, you probably wouldn't be getting your $110 per page fee.

Strike 1. You don't understand how the refereed astronomical journals work. I pay THEM $110 per page so that they will publish my paper; they do not pay me.

Your RIT paycheck may not have a federal imprimatur on it but without federal funding, RIT wouldn't be able to pay you squat.

Strike 2. RIT has a long history of teaching and has only recently -- in the past 5 or 7 years -- started heading in the direction of research. The school has a very detailed breakdown of income from tuition and expenses on items such as faculty salaries. Most of the money spent on my salary comes from tuition.

Would you care to try for a third statement illustrating your ignorance of this topic?

Re:Lawyers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists

[StupendousMan]

I'm not sure of your point here. My understanding is that "for profit" journals don't pay for peer review or referee. They charge a page fee.
However, they keep the copyright.

Correct. The parent poster claimed that "the public" should have free access to all scientific research, the copyrights to which are largely owned by a few journals. I was trying to say that if "the public" wants to own the copyright to this material, then "the public" ought to pay for all the expenses involved in refereeing, editing, typesetting, publishing, and distributing the journals.

Bank notes!

[maxwell demon]

I always wanted to print my own copies. :-)

Journals!

[autophile]

I'd like to take all of the IEEE journals and other scientific journals, plus the scientific works from Springer-Verlag, and put them on wiki. Of course, I would also like that to be continuous as well, so that new papers are also freed.

--Rob

senators and congressmen

[bcrowell]

How much did it cost Disney to buy the senators and congressmen who voted for the latest copyright extension?

An alternative use for the money

[Wills]

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.

Re:An alternative use for the money

[Chabil Ha']

I would suggest the money should be used instead to support a powerful well-funded lobbying effort for copyright reform...

I disagree. While $100 million is no laughable chunk o' change, its effectiveness is somewhat doubtful. Buying the rights to publish copyrighted works for all to use would have the most immediate (and gauranteed) benefit to those not just in the US, but all around the world.

I think reforming copyright is a futile effort at the present time. This isn't to say that it isn't worth worrying about, there just needs to be a more substantial and tangible reason than currently exists in order to move the politicians.

Create a Non-profit

[rotenberry]

"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.

A few of relevance to my subject area:

[ettlz]

• The Feynman Lectures
• Weinberg, volumes 1-3
• Landau and Lifschitz
• Zinn-Justin
• Wald
• Kleinert

to name but a few.

This is a shame, really

[eclectro]

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

Happy Birthday

[mccalli]

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

Re:Happy Birthday

[slothman32]

I actually wouldn't want it public.
Same with MLK's speech.
As both are copywritten they would be a good test of civil disobedience.
What would people think if you sung a "obviously" public song and got fined or jailed.
Maybe then people would want more public and less greed.
Or at least stuff in which the author has passed away, both true I believe, is public.

Re:Happy Birthday

[multimed]

According to Wikipedia:

"The version as we know it was copyrighted in 1935 by the Summy Company as an arrangement by Preston Ware Orem, and is scheduled to expire in 2030. This was the first copyrighted version to include the lyrics. The company holding the copyright was purchased by Warner Chappell in 1990 for $15 million dollars, with the value of "Happy Birthday" estimated at $5 million. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You

Re:Happy Birthday

[debrain]

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.


I completely disagree. There is no better spokesperson for the absurdity of our copyright laws than example, and this is the best example of absurdity that I can imagine.

When you tell someone they are infringing on copyright and have to pay royalties for singing Happy Birthday, they clue into the ridiculous laws that have been imposed on them. This awareness is the first step to creating momentum for reform.

The more absurd examples we can provide that the general public understands, the better armed activists are to achieve reform.

Teaching English to access more content

[Brento]

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.

Re:Teaching English to access more content

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Yay for cultural imperialism!

But seriously, that is a pretty racist remark. English is a minority language in the world, and by no means has a monopoly on 'first world content'. But the bottom line is why spend vast amounts of money teaching people a language that has no relevance to them (apart from understanding said 'first world content'), when you could pay someone to translate it, more cheaply and end up with content that fits in with local cultural tradition.

Re:Teaching English to access more content

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no expert... Far from it really. But you make it sound like english is hardly spoken at all... According to http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html english isn't really all that far down the list (#2). And as far as it's usefullness goes according to http://www.krysstal.com/english.html "It is the language of science, aviation, computing, diplomacy, and tourism." I'd say that's a pretty good reason to learn it...?

Don't let them know you're loaded!

[0xdeadbeef]

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.

Copyright clearing-house online...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Entertainment as well as education

[Petrushka]

Shakespere is public domain.

Current editions of Shakespeare aren't.

Classic Games

[popo]

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 obvious

[TRRosen]

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

Re:My vote....

[ebassi]

hookers and beer!

in fact, forget the beer! ah, screw the whole thing!

$100M won't buy shit these days

[throatmonster]

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.

Physics

[SleepyHappyDoc]

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.

National {fire|electrical|building} codes

[Dr. Zowie]

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.

Core concepts do not go out of date

[Anonymous Coward]

you have to wonder how much of these books will be outdated in 10 or 20 years, espically ones relating to rapidly evolving fields like computer science.

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.

Buy JSTOR, WoS, allow annotating papers

[felipecs]

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.

Re:Wikipedia to sell its Soul...

[kfg]

Could it be that the Wikipedia Foundation is considering to stop being a non-profit organisation and start placing advertising in its articles?

Nonprofit does not mean cannot be profitable. Nonprofit refers to how profits are dispersed, not necessarily how they are made. Ever see a museum without a gift shop? Wikipedia is not banned from placing advertising, they do not wish to. They are not free of advertising because they are nonprofit, it's the other way around, they are nonprofit so that they may solicit and take tax exempt donations in order to remain free of advertising.

Thus they can accept $100M from someone who only "spends" $50M, or less, to give it to them.

KFG

Penguin Classics are already free from copyright

[BeeBeard]

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.

Finnegan's Wake

[Gracenotes]

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.

Re:Business Plan

[Jehosephat2k]

9) ???
10) Profit!!!

$100 million not enough for most popular textbooks

[polv0]

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.

A Chilton Wiki?

[BeeBeard]

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! ;)

Depends on the Author I suppose

[grahamsz]

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.

Re:Depends on the Author I suppose

[sbaker]

Paying for things that already exist (even if copyrighted) is a waste. Books full of science can be read, summarised and written about with the existing rights we all have to that material. Paying to release the actual documents is unnecessary.

Let's pay for something new.

I'm betting most academics don't earn much over $100,000 a year. Take the $100M and pay the thousand smartest people on the planet to each spend an entire year writing about everything and anything they feel is important for the future of humanity - with the stipulation that every word they write in that year goes immediately into the public domain.

Think of the qualitative improvement in Wikipedia if we added tens of thousands of new articles by the smartest people in their fields.

Re:Depends on the Author I suppose

[sbaker]

No,no,no - wikipedia doesn't "own" everything they do for the year - they have to agree to OpenSource everything they do for the year.

And what if one or two do goof off - we'd be picking the 1000 most respected, smartest, people and making a big deal about the honor and aspects of perpetuity "The deepest thoughts of the thousand smartest people" - would such people really be stupid enough to goof off given that degree of public significance?

If only 900 of them produced anything - if just 1% of them produced something amazing...wouldn't it still be a wonderful way to spend a hundred mil?

scientific articles may need more money

[Goldsmith]

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.

What about Commissioning books to be written

[sokoban]

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.

The Larry Flint archive

[binarybum]

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.

Re:$100 million not enough for most popular textbo

[simpl3x]

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

Don't buy some books, buy some Senators

[bunions]

And fix the root of the copyright problem.

Money over time...

[NotQuiteReal]

I just think that they should spend money over a period of time

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.

A workable replacement for the RIAA

[Andy_R]

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.

Re:What is copy-protected?

[BrokenSegue]

You're looking in the wrong places.
Old works fall into the public domain 70 years after the author's death (in the US that is). Remember that translations are new and original works and so they might not be in the public domain. Just read Wikipedia's article.

Do you hate our children?

[jwkane]

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?

http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/10/20/school.sho otings.textbooks.ap/index.html

Machinists Handbook!

[DoninIN]

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?)

Whose Textbooks and Repair manuals?

[JoGlo]

A nice cosy little world we live in. I had thought that Wikpedia was for the world's use, but i see now that I am wrong. By the flavour of the posts above, it is very much an American resource.

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.

Re:Whose Textbooks and Repair manuals?

[chris macura]

You're right that the slant is very much american, but remember, if wikipedia buys the copyrights, then translations can be made. Biology, Chemistry, etc. are subjects which transcend language. It would be fantastic if the teaching base was standardized, all countries using the same textbook (language aside). Rather than wasting effort on re-writing the same material in twenty different ways, the community as a whole may suggest questions, tests, improvements, new diagrams, etc. I think this could be very useful for improving the standard of education, theoretically. In practice I'm sure some idiot is going to complain and it will never get used in schools.

The issue of the study of languages is one I know almost nothing about, so I won't presume to say anything about it. But let me just say that I can see the Americanism being a major issue there.

Re:Whose Textbooks and Repair manuals?

[nmb3000]

A nice cosy little world we live in. I had thought that Wikpedia was for the world's use, but i see now that I am wrong. By the flavour of the posts above, it is very much an American resource.

Oh give us a break, and get off your nationalistic high-horse.

Wikipedia and Slashdot originated in and are owned and run by people in the United States. Sure the Internet is a worldwide thing, but don't gripe if a majority of people on those sites appear to be American. If it's that big of a deal, go find different sites that better suit your needs.

and just aboiut any material that doesn't impact on our daily lives, with multiple interpretations would be fine for this

You're saying you wouldn't want something relevant to the present readily available? Why are things that could have a meaningful impact on our daily lives to be excluded? Maybe I'm just an insufferable pragmatist, but I think most people would love to have free and easy access to meaningful and useful texts--technical articles and textbooks of the 'classic' sciences such as physics and chemistry are great examples.

What exactly would you recommend (making sure of course that we don't somehow offend anyone)?

Re:Whose Textbooks and Repair manuals?

[Neeth]

Wikipedia and Slashdot originated in and are owned and run by people in the United States. Sure the Internet is a worldwide thing, but don't gripe if a majority of people on those sites appear to be American. If it's that big of a deal, go find different sites that better suit your needs.

Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/)

Common misconceptions

[bagsc]

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.

Re:Common misconceptions

[808140]

I wasn't able to easily find historical US GNP data on the web, but here is a table of historical GDP values for the United States, which is closely related to GNP. In inflation adjusted 2002 dollars, our GDP in 2005 was just over 11 trillion. In 1984, it was 5.8 trillion dollars, or roughly half of our GDP in 2005. Similary, in 1962 it was 2.7 trillion, roughly a quarter of our GDP in 2005. These figures are all in 2002 dollars and account for inflationary differences. In 1940, it was only about a trillion 2002 dollars, or a tenth of our output in 2005. In 1915, around 500 billion, or a twentieth. You get the idea. Someone made a nice graph from this data for Wikipedia.

Your response sounded skeptical. The parent obviously looked at the data while he authored his post. Of course, all of this could very well be misleading. The GDP is the best measure of economic performance we have, but it has a number of known flaws. It also fails to take economic shock into account -- but what the parent says is true on the face of it: if some catastrophe halved our economic output, we would be reduced to 1984 levels. Many of us lived through 1984. It wasn't bad.

So what's the problem with this logic? Let's look at the data. In 1929, the US's GDP was 865 billion dollars. In 1933, at the height of the great depression, it had fallen to 635 billion (you can see the blip on the Wikipedia graph linked above.) During the great depression, roughly 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed, people were starving and life is generally held to have been the hardest it has ever been in this country. And yet, in 1922 the GDP was 628 billion, even lower than the GDP of 1933 -- does this mean that in 1922, 1 in 4 people were unemployed, people were starving, and that quality of life was the same as in 1933? Of course not.

Between 1929 and 1933, in just 4 years, the GDP of the United States fell 26.6 percent and we barely recovered. Had it not been for the massive government spending required by World War II, who knows how we would have fared. Now just imagine for a moment that some catastrophe happened and the GDP of the United States fell 50% overnight to 1984 levels. Could we expect the same quality of life as 1984? No more than people in 1933 experienced the same quality of life as they had in 1922. And we're looking at a proportional decrease far greater and in far shorter a time than the 1929 to 1933 decrease.

I thought the grandparent's figures were interesting, but I have to say, I'm also a bit skeptical about how meaningful they are.

Re:Common misconceptions

[14CharUsername]

Getting back to the stone-age is nigh impossible.

A one-way ticket to Afghanistan would do it.

The vault

[tepples]

You want Bambi in pristine digital restoration? You'll find it at your corner drugstore selling for under $20.

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)?

Bambi's in prison, but not on Death Row.

[Kadin2048]

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.

instead of buying copyrights....

[urdine]

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?

Mod INSIGHTFUL

[Baricom]

instead of purchasing works directly, this could a several magnitudes of an order more free stuff if the guy decides to "purchase" a few key senators and representatives to fix some of that legislation Disney&Co have pushed through over the years

This was modded Funny as I'm posting, but it really should be marked Insightful. It's an excellent idea and one the benefactor should consider. Launching a copyright reform lobby could potentially pay off much more in the long run than liberating a single work would.

Won't this reduce the incentive to write wiki's?

[markholmberg]

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?

Global Digital Elevation Model

[bananaendian]

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:
http://edc.usgs.gov/products/elevation/gtopo30/gto po30.html

USGS Full specification of GTOPO30:
http://edc.usgs.gov/products/elevation/gtopo30/REA DME.html

Sincerely

Miikka Raninen