I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
--Jimbo
On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales [email protected] wrote:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
Maps, satellite pics, everything produced by the ESA, chem abs, single screenshots of as many films and TV shows as possible.
I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
--Jimbo
I would tend towards the position that the money would be better spent on digitalising stuff that was already in the public domain.
On 15/10/06, Jimmy Wales [email protected] wrote:
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Spend it on brib^Wcampaign contributions to get the US and then WIPO-approved term of copyright shortened.
- d.
On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales [email protected] wrote:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives?
Be bold,
*Wikimedia logos
be specific,
*good OCR software *good translation software *good video editing software *building codes and other "copyrighted laws" *http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm
be general,
*software *State government works *photos of people (living and dead) *maps and satellite photos *childrens books *fiction
brainstorm,
*myspace *Everything2 *YouTube *usenet
have fun with it.
*OSX
My top choice would be media-related software tools for which there just aren't good free software alternatives (but there are good non-free software tools out there). OCR, translation, and video editing are three areas I can think of. Even $100 million isn't enough to put more than a dent in the useful proprietary works out there.
Anthony
On Oct 15, 2006, at 10:27 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________
Would use it to do a licensing deal with big image/content houses like AP or CORBIS. That sum of money would talk to both of those organizations.
--Guy (En Hiatus User:Wgfinley)
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
Would use it to do a licensing deal with big image/content houses like AP or CORBIS. That sum of money would talk to both of those organizations.
Since you would to buy them outright I doubt it.
Ahhh, i'm remembering why I'm on hiatus. Dream a little........so someone can come and piss on it.
I think if you go to AP or CORBIS with a hundred mill and say "hey, we want to work out a bulk licensing deal for copyright permissions" I'm certain something would get done. Would it be every single thing they do with unlimited rights? No. Wold it be an enormous chunk of images we could sorely use? Most definitely.
--Guy
On Oct 15, 2006, at 11:55 AM, geni wrote:
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
Would use it to do a licensing deal with big image/content houses like AP or CORBIS. That sum of money would talk to both of those organizations.
Since you would to buy them outright I doubt it.
-- geni _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Guy, please just try to avoid Geni's trolling. I know it is hard, but sometimes it is necessary in order to get anything done. :)
W. Guy Finley wrote:
Ahhh, i'm remembering why I'm on hiatus. Dream a little........so someone can come and piss on it.
I think if you go to AP or CORBIS with a hundred mill and say "hey, we want to work out a bulk licensing deal for copyright permissions" I'm certain something would get done. Would it be every single thing they do with unlimited rights? No. Wold it be an enormous chunk of images we could sorely use? Most definitely.
--Guy
On Oct 15, 2006, at 11:55 AM, geni wrote:
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
Would use it to do a licensing deal with big image/content houses like AP or CORBIS. That sum of money would talk to both of those organizations.
Since you would to buy them outright I doubt it.
-- geni _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Commons-l mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
I think if you go to AP or CORBIS with a hundred mill and say "hey, we want to work out a bulk licensing deal for copyright permissions" I'm certain something would get done. Would it be every single thing they do with unlimited rights? No. Wold it be an enormous chunk of images we could sorely use? Most definitely.
Does Corbis even own the copyright on the images they archive? What about AP?
On 10/15/06, Anthony [email protected] wrote:
Does Corbis even own the copyright on the images they archive? What about AP?
This is a bit off topic, but Corbis CLAIMS to own the copyright on all of their images. They have a substantial number of public domain images in their catalog as well that they claim to own the copyright on as well (i.e. many images from the 19th century, some which were created by the U.S. federal government, etc.), because they "own the copyright to the scan" (at least, that's what their lawyer told me when I asked about a few of them in particular). Which is of course bullshit, but they don't seem to mind charging people licensing fees "for the scan". If we want to do anything with them, let's make sure we don't pay for anything that shouldn't need to be paid for.
FF
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
Ahhh, i'm remembering why I'm on hiatus. Dream a little........so someone can come and piss on it.
If you don't identify problems you can't improve things. What do AP have that we don't and have no reasonable way of getting?
Photos of newsworthy events where there was no US miltitry presence. Now aside from AP and simular who has these photos?
Buying up big photo archives has some attactions but it is likely we would waste a lot of money on stuff we could have produced anyway.
Go to apimages.com and you will see a few hundred images we can't produce. They are timeless and unique just like the two photos I worked with them to get permissions on -- Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and Trang Bang.
Same thing with CORBIS, go to their website, type in a name and start watching all the photos that come up. Could we get some of these as press publicity photos? Probably, asserting fair use. How about having an agreement in place with CORBIS about our use of them so there is never a question about the legitimacy of the use of an image?
We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we can obtain. But there are a whole slew of historical photographs owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what I was getting at. I know, because I've deleted them before. The press is everywhere and over decades has acquired scores of important images, I'd like to use them, LEGALLY while protecting the rights of their creators. A big pile of money would help us do that.
--Guy
On Oct 15, 2006, at 1:41 PM, geni wrote:
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
Ahhh, i'm remembering why I'm on hiatus. Dream a little........so someone can come and piss on it.
If you don't identify problems you can't improve things. What do AP have that we don't and have no reasonable way of getting?
Photos of newsworthy events where there was no US miltitry presence. Now aside from AP and simular who has these photos?
Buying up big photo archives has some attactions but it is likely we would waste a lot of money on stuff we could have produced anyway.
-- geni _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On 15/10/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we can obtain. But there are a whole slew of historical photographs owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what I was getting at.
How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else is just picking at the edges of the problem.
- d.
On Oct 15, 2006, at 2:52 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 15/10/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we can obtain. But there are a whole slew of historical photographs owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what I was getting at.
How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else is just picking at the edges of the problem.
- d.
Commons-l mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
David, I respect your thought on this but this is a pipe dream no hundred million can fulfill. Disney sneezes $100 mil and they have fought for copyright extension extensively. Getting US copyright law changed requires a political movement, and a few hundred legislators growing a background to corporate graft, not necessarily money.
--Guy
On 15/10/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
On Oct 15, 2006, at 2:52 PM, David Gerard wrote:
How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else is just picking at the edges of the problem.
David, I respect your thought on this but this is a pipe dream no hundred million can fulfill. Disney sneezes $100 mil and they have fought for copyright extension extensively. Getting US copyright law changed requires a political movement, and a few hundred legislators growing a background to corporate graft, not necessarily money.
Yeah, I know. It's still the actual problem, though.
(This is why I actually hope Citizendium and Encyclopedia of Earth take off - more open content is good for propagandising the model.)
I suppose the best stuff would be the stuff that would serve as good lead examples for the rest.
- d.
On 10/15/06, David Gerard [email protected] wrote:
How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else is just picking at the edges of the problem.
There are humongous amounts of currently PD content which we do not yet have... Much of it rotting away on paper or celluloid because even under today's ridiculously long copyright terms there is not a clear business case for someone to digitize it and restore it.
Making copyright reasonably shorter would only make the preservation of old works even harder by removing the incentive to preserve old works and even creating an incentive to package new works in self-destructing wrappers that remove the work before it has a chance to become free... so I could counter your position with the argument that shortening copyright is just picking at the edges of the problem.
There are many groups which are trying to 'free' content by taking apart modern copyright, such as creative commons and (to an extent) the internet archive. This is important work, but I don't think that our strengths rest in this area... our models of execution have thus far shown themselves to be inferior to the models used by groups like internet archive for that sort of work... but have proven themselves to be superior for the sort of work we do: creating new free works, and digesting old free works into more usable and accessible forms.
The real genius of Richard Stallman's work is existence proof that, at least in the field of software, you could create a sustainable universe of free works without abolishing a system of copyright law that automatically makes all works unfree. Wikimedia extends that evidence to the field of useful non-software content... and this is by-large what makes our efforts distinctive to other groups (yes, our methods are distinctive as well, but to outsiders it doesn't matter much how the sausage is made).
So while we could certainly benefit from a bit of liberated content here or there, if the intention of such funding is simply to increase the size of the free world by buying some content (or, buying changes to copyright law).. it would, perhaps, be money better spent with the assistance of another group.
Instead I'd like to see us describing not just what stuff we'd buy and stick in a warehouse, but how we'd take the content and integrate it, enhance it, translate it, and transform it.. into works which are truly useful for the world today and for the world of the future.
On 15/10/06, Gregory Maxwell [email protected] wrote:
Making copyright reasonably shorter would only make the preservation of old works even harder by removing the incentive to preserve old works and even creating an incentive to package new works in self-destructing wrappers that remove the work before it has a chance to become free... so I could counter your position with the argument that shortening copyright is just picking at the edges of the problem.
Possibly. But I do recall Larry Lessig arguing real-life examples of precisely the opposite to the Supreme Court: old films that weren't old enough to be PD, rotting away precisely because untangling the copyright would be too much work.
The real genius of Richard Stallman's work is existence proof that, at least in the field of software, you could create a sustainable universe of free works without abolishing a system of copyright law that automatically makes all works unfree. Wikimedia extends that evidence to the field of useful non-software content... and this is by-large what makes our efforts distinctive to other groups (yes, our methods are distinctive as well, but to outsiders it doesn't matter much how the sausage is made).
The comparison that sprang to my mind when this was mentioned was: if someone had said to the FSF "we will free some proprietary software of your choice; which one do you want?" in 1985, what would they have answered?
(Now, I think they'd answer "none; take away the software patent laws and we can write it ourselves.")
Instead I'd like to see us describing not just what stuff we'd buy and stick in a warehouse, but how we'd take the content and integrate it, enhance it, translate it, and transform it.. into works which are truly useful for the world today and for the world of the future.
Sounds good.
- d.
On 10/15/06, David Gerard [email protected] wrote:
Possibly. But I do recall Larry Lessig arguing real-life examples of precisely the opposite to the Supreme Court: old films that weren't old enough to be PD, rotting away precisely because untangling the copyright would be too much work.
On the other hand various PD film collections (The IWM's comes to mind)
On 10/15/06, Gregory Maxwell [email protected] wrote:
Making copyright reasonably shorter would only make the preservation of old works even harder by removing the incentive to preserve old works
I strongly disagree. Projects like Gutenberg, DP, the various digital libraries at universities, etc. have proven that once you remove the barriers of traditional copyright, the amount of work that can be done to preserve content is multiplied. Furthermore, economic analysis has shown that the vast majority of content that is "trapped" by copyright actually has hardly any economic value anymore (check the Amicus Curiae briefs in the Eldred case). Market forces alone tend to be poor guardians of history.
David Gerard wrote:
On 15/10/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we can obtain. But there are a whole slew of historical photographs owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what I was getting at.
How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else is just picking at the edges of the problem.
May I remind everybody that this is a publicly archived mailing-list? :-)
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
Go to apimages.com and you will see a few hundred images we can't produce.
I'm seeing maybe 1.
They are timeless and unique just like the two photos I worked with them to get permissions on -- Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and Trang Bang.
however not permission for reuse.
Same thing with CORBIS, go to their website, type in a name and start watching all the photos that come up. Could we get some of these as press publicity photos? Probably, asserting fair use. How about having an agreement in place with CORBIS about our use of them so there is never a question about the legitimacy of the use of an image?
Again this brings up reuse issues.
We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we can obtain. But there are a whole slew of historical photographs owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what I was getting at. I know, because I've deleted them before. The press is everywhere and over decades has acquired scores of important images, I'd like to use them, LEGALLY while protecting the rights of their creators. A big pile of money would help us do that.
Problem is those are exactly the images they will not want to see released under a free licence. I agree that targeting individual items is the logical course
While purchase of large amounts of material might be nice I think we could get better value by having a "fighting fund" which is used to obtain images that cannot be obtained through any other means rather than bulk buying which is likely to result in a lot of duplicating material we can get in other ways.
On Oct 15, 2006, at 3:30 PM, geni wrote:
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
Go to apimages.com and you will see a few hundred images we can't produce.
I'm seeing maybe 1.
You must not have gone beyond the entry page then, go search their holdings
They are timeless and unique just like the two photos I worked with them to get permissions on -- Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and Trang Bang.
however not permission for reuse.
Same thing with CORBIS, go to their website, type in a name and start watching all the photos that come up. Could we get some of these as press publicity photos? Probably, asserting fair use. How about having an agreement in place with CORBIS about our use of them so there is never a question about the legitimacy of the use of an image?
Again this brings up reuse issues.
We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we can obtain. But there are a whole slew of historical photographs owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what I was getting at. I know, because I've deleted them before. The press is everywhere and over decades has acquired scores of important images, I'd like to use them, LEGALLY while protecting the rights of their creators. A big pile of money would help us do that.
Problem is those are exactly the images they will not want to see released under a free licence. I agree that targeting individual items is the logical course
While purchase of large amounts of material might be nice I think we could get better value by having a "fighting fund" which is used to obtain images that cannot be obtained through any other means rather than bulk buying which is likely to result in a lot of duplicating material we can get in other ways.
The rest of this is an entire philosophical issue. Yes, it would be best if everything we had was absolutely free content that we could pass on to anyone else to use as they wish. If we stick to that as our only criteria for using material then all fair-use material goes out the window and all material used with permission goes out the window. I believe having it with permission and restrictions on use is better than not having it at all.
--Guy
On 10/16/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
On Oct 15, 2006, at 3:30 PM, geni wrote:
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley [email protected] wrote:
Go to apimages.com and you will see a few hundred images we can't produce.
I'm seeing maybe 1.
You must not have gone beyond the entry page then, go search their holdings
I flicked thorugh various pages. A few sports events those NK pics and pics of people.
The rest of this is an entire philosophical issue. Yes, it would be best if everything we had was absolutely free content that we could pass on to anyone else to use as they wish. If we stick to that as our only criteria for using material then all fair-use material goes out the window and all material used with permission goes out the window. I believe having it with permission and restrictions on use is better than not having it at all.
--Guy
I doubt you would be able to chnage wikipedia policy to that degree.
On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 18:27:41 +0300, Jimmy Wales [email protected] wrote:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Images and video of important events and people of the 20th century.
"Jimmy Wales" [email protected] wrote on Sunday, October 15, 2006 5:27 PM:
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
A beginning would be having a professional account at www.copyscape.com :)
Best regards,
Flo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Scientists have a zillion valuable photographs that they're sitting on, either out of lack of motivation or because they hope to use it in a future publication, and they don't necessarily know about free licensing. Hire somebody to work fulltime organizing volunteers to contact these people, or call them personally. Place ads in professional journals. Possibly offer nominal payment (call them "honoraria" :-) ) in exchange for free licenses. Hire a couple prominent people as consultants to visibly offer their material and lobby their colleagues.
Also, contract for legal advice in various countries to get the real status of their material, such as the Philippine government situation discussed recently. A statute found online does not take into account court cases for instance, and you'd need a qualified practitioner to come up with the right rule for Wikimedia projects.
Stan
On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:24:06 +0300, Stan Shebs [email protected] wrote:
Scientists have a zillion valuable photographs that they're sitting on, either out of lack of motivation or because they hope to use it in a future publication, and they don't necessarily know about free licensing.
This is a good idea!
Stan Shebs wrote:
Scientists have a zillion valuable photographs that they're sitting on, either out of lack of motivation or because they hope to use it in a future publication, and they don't necessarily know about free licensing.
Beep.
In many (most ?) cases, scientists are employed under terms of contracts or law that assign copyright for works done during their professional duties to their employer.
On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales [email protected] wrote:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
[snip]
How sustainable do you see this sort of funding being?
I ask because I think it makes a difference in how we handle this sort of planning.
Because of the huge spread of topics and interests in our projects, there is sure to be as many good ideas as there are users.
If this is to be a one time event, the best way to handle it is perhaps for a Wikimedia executive (i.e. you) to put out a call.. select a couple of the best ideas, and then see which of them can be done for the funding we have.
If there is a possibility of continuing this model further, I think a better approach would be to setup a tracker of ideas (perhaps as simple as a wikipage, although the sales forecasting component of a CRM might be more powerful) which we can use to determine which ideas are most widely supported, and from that list we can go and presumptively obtain budgetary numbers for the ideas. With the costs in hand we could then seek appropriate funding to make the dreams a reality.
I think that if we're going to consider the big impact ideas... it's not a much a question of finding the ideas, because a couple of them should be pretty obvious to all of us ("Hey, lets buy a small but well established US textbook company, open up their books, enhance them through collaborative development, and take english speaking schools by storm while we use the income to translate the work and replicate it world wide")... The real challenge for those is figuring out "How much?" and all the other logistics.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales [email protected] wrote:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
[snip]
How sustainable do you see this sort of funding being?
Note that Jimbo does not necessary imply that the Foundation has this budget. This may be the budget of another organisation acting upon our recommandation.
Ant
I ask because I think it makes a difference in how we handle this sort of planning.
Because of the huge spread of topics and interests in our projects, there is sure to be as many good ideas as there are users.
If this is to be a one time event, the best way to handle it is perhaps for a Wikimedia executive (i.e. you) to put out a call.. select a couple of the best ideas, and then see which of them can be done for the funding we have.
If there is a possibility of continuing this model further, I think a better approach would be to setup a tracker of ideas (perhaps as simple as a wikipage, although the sales forecasting component of a CRM might be more powerful) which we can use to determine which ideas are most widely supported, and from that list we can go and presumptively obtain budgetary numbers for the ideas. With the costs in hand we could then seek appropriate funding to make the dreams a reality.
I think that if we're going to consider the big impact ideas... it's not a much a question of finding the ideas, because a couple of them should be pretty obvious to all of us ("Hey, lets buy a small but well established US textbook company, open up their books, enhance them through collaborative development, and take english speaking schools by storm while we use the income to translate the work and replicate it world wide")... The real challenge for those is figuring out "How much?" and all the other logistics.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
How sustainable do you see this sort of funding being?
For the purposes of this exercise, assume it is sustainable. (And help me think of models which might make it sustainable?)
I think that if we're going to consider the big impact ideas... it's not a much a question of finding the ideas, because a couple of them should be pretty obvious to all of us ("Hey, lets buy a small but well established US textbook company, open up their books, enhance them through collaborative development, and take english speaking schools by storm while we use the income to translate the work and replicate it world wide")... The real challenge for those is figuring out "How much?" and all the other logistics.
Right. At the moment, we are assigned the task of dreaming up creative ideas of what we would find useful. The next steps would be to think about how much what we want would cost, and how there could be a sustainable model of getting it.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
--Jimbo
Surfing on the long tail :-)
ant
--- Jimmy Wales [email protected] skrev:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
How about photos of dead notable people such as politicians, musicians and scientists (most images of people living between 1920-1980 are used under "fair use") ;
of buildings that no longer exists;
historical photos of the past that are released free *by the copyright owner* (not just "free" as in published before 1923, or confiscated by the allies during WWII). Say photos of the Kristallnacht.
Music pieces of groundbreaking artist that are no longer among us. Say Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Buddy Holly.
Why not short video footage of important events or TV-shows? For example an exerpt of "What's My Line?" (1960) or from the Adam West Batman TV-series (1967)...
/ Fred-Chess
On 10/15/06, Fredrik Josefsson [email protected] wrote:
How about photos of dead notable people such as politicians, musicians and scientists (most images of people living between 1920-1980 are used under "fair use") ;
US gov photos or fan photos should exist in most cases.
of buildings that no longer exists;
Depending on the dates where they did exist there are various options.
2006/10/15, Jimmy Wales [email protected]:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
That's three times yes, although I would like to extend 'textbooks' to 'non-fiction' more general. Also I think the ideas mentioned are good in the sense that from there speaks an (in my opinion correct) idea that even with a few million dollars, it would be good to make savings through going after commercially less or not viable material. This would be a situation where quantity beats quality.
However, at least as important as getting the material would be to have it 1. available, and 2. identifyable.
What I mean is that it is little worth to have large numbers of whatever material if it is hard for people to come by the material. Best would be to have it available on the web, and I think the money would be well spent that was spent on scanning the material that has been liberated, so that it can actually be accessed from all over the world.
The second is of different importance for different resources - for a book, if we know title and author, people can just check for themselves whether it is usable. But a photo collection is worth little if there is no information added on *what* is actually on the photograph. Having photographs of thousands of moderately famous people is worth little unless it actually says WHO is on the photo. Likewise, photographs of past news events would be very good to have, but only if descriptions are provided as to what news event is depicted. 100 pictures of "some politician talking to a group of people" are not as good as one of "Imre Nagy announcing Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact".