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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?
A history of Pornography would be very informative.
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?
Technophile
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!
Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Sun Tzu, Chaucer-- yeah, I think a few of those might be off copyright already.
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.
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)
- 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'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
I always wanted to print my own copies. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
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"
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
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.
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.
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.
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...?
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
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.....
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.
www.sjbaker.org