Talk:Copyright wishlist/Archive 1

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This is an archived version of this page, as edited by 172.177.224.18 (talk) at 17:59, 22 October 2006 (→‎[[User:Ashibaka]]). It may differ significantly from the current version.

See also

  1. ↑ Some replies aren't displayed in the main thread. URLs in small fonts links to these messages.

Suggestions

User:FrancisTyers

  1. Abamedia: Russian Archives Online. — contains a hell of a lot of stuff that can't be reproduced — photographs, films, sounds etc. Much of the stuff would be in the public domain (e.g. newsreels from the 1920s.)
  2. Stuff formerly licensed as {{PD-Soviet}}. Some of the stuff that has been deleted should be able to be bought for a reasonable price... if the original author can be found. (I have an off-Wikipedia archive of around 3,000 of the former PD-Soviet images). - FrancisTyers 16:27, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    I think en:ITAR-TASS agency is major copyright holder of Soviet photos.
  1. Another thing, it might be worth spending some of the money to get professional legal opinions/judgements on the copyright and historical copyright status of countries and items that are questionable. For example, who owns the rights to works published in X by Y at Z time. (I'm still thinking about PD-Soviet stuff here -- or stuff published during the Spanish Civil War. - FrancisTyers 12:20, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Frederick "FN" Noronha

  1. Government-funded software.
  2. Archives.
  3. All UN-related publications.
  4. Photographs of archival value.
  5. Textbooks.
  6. Out-of-print books.
  7. Documentary film and sharable footage.
  8. Music created by non-corporate artistes.
  9. Recordings of state-funded radio stations.
  10. Newspapers' content (which are over 24 hours old, in case of dailies)
  11. Local language computing solutions
  12. Translations tools across languages.
  13. Archives of content of all websites prior to 2005.
  14. Government records and files over five years old.
  15. Old musical recordings on wax cylinders and especially porcelain, depicting the development of modern music around the world. Like films, these would have to be remastered, at a considerable costs.

WarX

  1. Schemes (from designers of them) of machines throught all ages (especially 16th-21st century):
    • ships
    • steam engines
    • warmachines
    • fuel and electric engines
    • full factorys/power plants/etc.
    • cars
    • locomotives (train engines)
    • planes
    • space ships
    • etc.
    • Especially vector versions would be very nice (or scans precise enought to construct all of those machines and vectorise the plans itself) --WarX 17:37, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
great idea. support! --Jacopo86 08:19, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Erik Zachte

Danny

Three things from me:

  1. Power scanners to help absorb materials, including scanners with page-turning capacity that do not destroy old books.
  2. Invest in the restoration of old films, mainly on celluloid, which would then be entered into the public domain, rather than controlled by the people who first manufactured them. These films, which are disintegrating day after day, are part of our cultural heritage, and include works by Chaplin, Theda Bara, Buster Keaton, etc. (for Americans) as well as the great European masters (Vigo, Eisenstadt, Lumiere Brothers, etc., for the Europeans. Old newsreels are an important historical document of key events such as World War I, the Russian Revolution, etc.
  3. Old musical recordings on wax cylinders and especially porcelain, depicting the development of modern music around the world. Like films, these would have to be remastered, at a considerable costs. Danny 16:03, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bogdan

There are a few types of photos for which a free equivalent is very hard to find:

  1. photos of 20th century presidents and other incumbents of various countries.
  2. plants and animals in isolated places. Anyone can take photos of the plants which grow in the backyard or the nearest forest, but the greatest diversity of species in our world is found in places like Amazonia and Indonesia. A collection of identified plants would be of great value.

But also, it would be great to try to obtain Public Domain works:

Wikimedia could try to collaborate with various governments for the digitalization and preservation of public domain works and archives. The governments of many countries have extensive archives of old photographs, engravings or even paintings, which would be of great encyclopedical values for our history and biography articles.

Also, Wikisource and Project Gutenberg could try to collaborate with various libraries, also for the scanning and OCRing old books and periodicals.

Bogdan 16:59, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

555

Copyright property of translations of classical texts that don't have yet a public domain/free use version, copyright property of best selling books to allow development of paralel universes and fan-fictions to everyone, copyright property for a high quality dictionary (monolingual/bilingual) and copyright property of Scansoft OminiPage to release it under GPL and port do Unix/Linux OS may be a good start point =D 555 17:04, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Lincher / on english

  • Earth imagery to create nice images to go with articles.
  • University theses, if not copy-lefted, at least, available to everyone.
  • Pictures of artefacts that come from museums, galleries (even hidden ones like the Louvre), libraries and more.

Lincher 03:05, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Jakob Voss

  • You can invest the money in
    • promoting the idea of free knowledge and open content in general. We don't even have a simple open-conten-for-dummies handout - the community fails on creating enough qualitative promoting material about our own projects.
    • promoting to cut down the today-70-years-tomorrow-even-longer copyright regime - it only helps big company copyright holders while its of no use for authors and hinders preservation of works where the copyright holder is unknown. A timespan of 20 yers after publication should be enough for a monopol.
    • Freeing knowledge organization. License the Dewey Decimal Classification and other classification and thesauri.
    • Free fonts that cover all of Unicode (already mentioned)
    • Drawed illustrations and instructions for Wikibooks that are usable by non-english-speaking-geeks too (how do make fire, how to produce electricity, how to clean your water, how to learn to read...)
    • Methods that let the people free themselves :-)

Daniel Schwen

Geodata. Data to generate free maps (or a Wikiatlas, or better maps for the WikiMiniAtlas extension), country borders (up to date and high res). Major rivers, cites and roads worldwide. The US is a model country in this respect, but for the rest of the world mos governments sell the data acquired by geographical surveys funded with tax-money to companies like TeleAtlas.

Bramfab

The collections of the most relevant newspapers of the world (at least one per each language of wikipedia)

Paginazero

I have no direct references to mention, but I'd invest such a budget in world history and collective memory. Newspapers can be fine, but also the public governative archives of the nations of the world and of sovranational organizations. Although I'm scared of the huge work it'd take to "wikify" all that stuff.

The Doc

May be the most practical request. Two books: one of chemistry (p. Silvestroni Fondamenti di chimica ISBN 88-408-0998-8 in italian to be traslated) and one of medicine (Harrison's principles of internal medicine McGraw-Hill U.S. ISBN 0-07-13914-1) that I consider the most complete books. Put them on source and books wiil give to he world a great amount of knowledge and their contents will continue to grow becouse of wiki principles

Jacopo86

I suggest illustrated text books such as art history books general history books or technical books with a lot of technical drawings. Also photography of people will be good. I mean photo of politician, scientist, writer, singer, film director and so on. Also the books suggested by The Doc are very useful.

Oppose photographs of living people. They are not impossible to take your own free versions. Dead people is another matter. - FrancisTyers 11:29, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I mean large collections of photographs (if existing). Something like a sticker album or an illustrated who's who. However i don't know if this collection is alvaible... --Jacopo86 13:02, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think something like some of the collection of Rolling Stone, BBC, Time, Life, or some other source of cultural benchmark photos. I know this is highly unlikely, but it'd be cool to be able to use even only a portion of these photos. Youngamerican 17:40, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Youngamerican

Something like a chunk of the video archive of the BBC might be nice to have. Basically, the foundation could have something along the lines of a youtube-type site that legally shows much of the archives of the Beeb (I only picked them due to their longevity and international scope, but some other tv outlet, network, or production company would work too). Imagine how much could be at the tip of your fingers if something like this was available, especially as broadbadn goes global. Just a thought. Youngamerican 17:46, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:ALoan

  • How much would it cost to buy EB, or a smaller encyclopedia? (Even smaller ones tend to have better and more comprehensive "encyclopedic" content of many core categories... I know, we are working on it... )
  • The right to reproduce images from leading museums, such as the Louvre, British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, etc (we often claim that they don't own the copyright for 2-dimensional works, under Corel v Bridgeman, but access is often difficult).
  • Rather than buying copyrights, it would be nice to have a mechanism (à la Rambot) to get existing free content into Wikipedia (as far as I am aware, we don't have the complete text of the 11th edition of EB from 1911, for example, and there are other out-of-copyright sources that could just be dumped in; 1st edition of the DNB and its supplements will give us decent biographical coverage to 1901; 2nd edition of Grove would give decent musical coverage to 1910; any number of encyclopedias of classical history, etc). Perhaps tarticles could be copied to a subpage, for ease of merging with existing content? -- ALoan 17:57, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Badlydrawnjeff

  • Copies of (or actual) primary source material. Ease of ability to use it from, say, Wikisource or Wikibooks would be incredibly useful.
  • Equipment to incorporate any and all posible public domain materials into the servers and projects. Encouragement of PD use would be very helpful.

User:Allen3

  • Photographs of 20th century politicians, scientists, athletes, and other celebrities.
  • Digital images of museum works (Corel v Bridgeman helps with 2-D paintings but quality images can still be hard to obtain)

w:User:Jdavidb

Stbalbach

  1. 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.
  2. Purchase any number of excellent encyclopedia's that are usually only available at libraries. The 13-volume authoritative Dictionary of the Middle Ages for example (which its self was paid for in part by grants).


User:CBDunkerson

  1. Images of characters/objects/places from fiction - These are generally 'derivative works' by definition and thus all existing images are often 'fair use'. Purchasing the right to freely release certain images from the copyright holders would vastly benefit these articles.
  2. Images of notable people - these tend to be taken by news organizations and thus to be 'fair use'. Buying such photos from the press or having a 'Wikinews photographer' with press credentials to cover them would be an improvement. Individuals can and do take such pictures, but this is haphazard and often at a distance, in poor lighting, or otherwise of lower quality than those at staged press events.
  3. Other 'fair use' images - In addition to the two large categories above just a general purchase of fair use images which are difficult to obtain through other means would be beneficial.
  4. Out of print 'encyclopedias' - There are hundreds of topic specific 'encyclopedias' and similar compilations which are out of print, unlikely to ever be reprinted, but still under copyright for decades to come. Purchasing these from the copyright holders might be viable as it is income they would not otherwise get and could provide us with vast amounts of detailed material on plants, animals, diseases, civil war personages, dance steps, archaeological dig sites, embroidery patterns, ad infinitum.
  5. Newspaper archives - These could go in Wikisource or a new sub-project and become a vast library of reliable/verifiable reference materials. The Times isn't likely to sell their archives, but newspapers which are shutting down might be willing to.

User:Dijxtra

OK, Jimbo, you said think big. So I'll think big:

  • As Lincher said above: earth imagery. World Wind is free, but not detailed enough. If we could get better resolution, it'd be great. Unfortunately (since I'm not geodata expert), I don't know the service which offeres better quality except Google Maps, and I guess buying Google Maps is not an option :-)
  • Maps. Atlases, charts, maps. Lots of those. Detailed atlases of every country in the world. Buy it and release it into PD. Everybody will love you for it, and I'll buy you a beer (I guess that buying a beer to a guy which has $100M to spare is a lame thing, but I'd do that anyway).
  • Encyclopedias. Preferably more specific (pardon my bad English, but by specific I think of those that are not general, fot instance "maritime encyclopedia", "encyclopedia of aviation" and such) ones and local ones (which tend to have more information on history and geography of a location, for instance en:General Encyclopedia of Yugoslavian Lexicographic Institute).
  • Dictionaries. English-somelanguage dictionaries. Get few of these and dump it to Wiktionary. That gives you rudimental but imense somelanguage-someotherlanguage dictionary. And then you can brag like this: look, we didn't invest all of it into Wikipedia, we invested some in other projects ;-) If this option is chosen, I buy you another beer for Persian dictionary ;-)

Those are just my first ideas, maybe I think of something later. Am I thinking too big? :-) --Dijxtra 18:51, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding satellite imagery, Google mainly repurposes satellite data from DigitalGlobe. Since the images make up a large part of the company's business, I don't think they'd be willing to set any of it free. I suspect the same is true of similar companies.
That's why we need $100M, because nobody will set anything free for free. ;-) But, if you buy the copyrights, then you are free to set it free for free. Lots of "free"s here. --Dijxtra 11:29, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe Wikimedia could buy a satellite to produce photos in-house. :^P – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 21:23, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Not an option here, we're supposed to figure out which material we want to be set free, not how to spend that money ;-) --Dijxtra 11:29, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
But it makes the point that purchasing satellite imagery is silly. To attempt to buy out such a big market asset is just wasteful. To be honest, the copyrighted material currently is pretty adequate already; for example the free version of Google Earth. Google's terms are hardly restrictive and provide very powerful access to very lightly watermarked imagery. Wikimedia isn't about communism, and I think digital mapping, at least for now, is an industry which is well suited to its current capitalist model. Bigbluefish 11:56, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Mion

  • Top level recent information ==

I agree with Frederick, copyrighted information/publications from the United Nations (UN)[[1]] and departmens of it and sortlike public funded organisations. (How about the EU ? which is doing the same) , Speeding up the circulation of that type of information is helpfull for society,

  • Or, where another part of information is created, in the Academic Journal/Peer review system.

fabiform

  • definately a library of pictures of notable people (current and 20th century politicians, scientists, artists, others...)
  • library of good resolution pictures of 2d and 3d art etc as found in museums and art galleries around the world both for work which is in the public domain and still under copyright (it's hard to legitimately get images of public domain works of art when they are housed in collections)
  • medical quality photographs and diagrams of the human body and its organs etc both in health and disease (all too often we have to fall back on a single image from gray's anatomy when any article could benefit from more than one diagram and photographs with different focus/perspectives)

Seed music

While James Brown was in jail, the upcoming rap artists used samples of his works extensively. If you could find some pieces of modern music with such a potential for reuse, that could be great. I wonder, Michael Jackson had the rights for The Beatles music. If he has not resold them yet, could he use 100 million dollars? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.20.17.84 (talk)

Mailer Diablo

Not sure if the funds would be enough, but I think buying down the royalties of past Associated Press photo collections (those before the 1990s) en-masse would be great.

  1. Definitely encyclopedic. For every photo that a reputable news agency has shot, probably another Wikipedia article out there demands for it.
  2. We can get rid of a whole lot of fair use images, especially when it comes to time-based events where there is no previously known free replacement other than from news agencies.
  3. Benefits project-wide. These photos can then be uploaded to Wikipedia Commons, and then applies to all editions of Wikipedia.
  4. Sustainable returns. Giving them away in return for crediting Wikipedia (GFDL) brings in more visitors to the project. - Mailer Diablo 19:29, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes! Many of these AP photos are just as encyclopedic as old paintings that have their own articles at Wikipedia. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 21:28, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

angus

Textbooks. --angus (msgs) 20:01, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AxelBoldt

Textbooks is seconded. Identify the 100 core subjects of standard undergraduate education, for each subject choose a leading textbook, then liberate these textbooks of all copyright restrictions, make them available for free download and use them to seed wikibook projects. (This might require a bit more than $108 though.) AxelBoldt 20:08, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Jon513

Textbooks is thirded (is that a word?). Textbooks much more than any other information consumed is a major financial burden. More so than news, encyclopedia, or pictures. It is also very difficult to find free alternatives. Also other information (news, pictures) is more a luxury than a necessity. Free textbooks can change the world allowing a global standardization of education. Jon513 19:40, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Improv

  • Satellite imagery (there are many cool ways we could integrate such a database into MediaWiki software)
  • Sheet Music
  • Contents of scientific journals (this could be huge)
  • Back issues of political journals (e.g. Far East Review)
  • Judicial Commentary from Lexis-Nexis/Westlaw/etc, as appropriate by countries (although I suspect they would not be interested in sharing this information)
  • Archives from legislative summary services
  • Collections of Responsa/Fatwa/other religious rulings and discussions

Categorically, it would be interesting to enter into an agreement with journal companies whereby when specific journal issues become 10 years old, we acquire them under GFDL license - presumably they're not reselling them beyond that point, and it would not be hard to build a large list of journals we're interested in.

Instead of buying, spend money on persuading

A huge pile of content is non-free not because the author wants to control it or profit from it, but for purely historical reasons, negligence, and cluelessness. So I'd propose to spend part of the money on a low-noise, targeted promotional campaign. Mail personalized letters to world governments, various agencies, publishers, all kinds of content creators. Explain, persuade, help them make however much of their content free. I'm sure this will open up more content than outright buying. 24.137.84.198 21:06, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I wholeheartedly agree. National archives, art galleries, scientific research, museums, geographical data, even governmental press releases containing useful images... most of the world knowledge is "owned" by the governments and paid with people's money. Lobbying them for releasing that materials under a free license would prove more worthwhile than paying slave traders to release their slaves. Cinabrium 02:44, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's certainly a good point...see if you can get something for a few hundred before you buy it outright for thousands.--HereToHelp (talk) 18:35, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

501(c)(3) ?

I think 24.137.84.198 has a good point, but where is this $100M coming from? If it is from the 501(c)(3) foundation, aren’t there limitations as to how we can use the money? Personally, I want pictures archived by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA--a Japanese equivalent of NASA). The Japanese government can claim copyrights under current Japanese laws and regulations……and there is (almost) no “fair use” concept in Japan. I can use most of NASA’s pictures in our Japanese Wiki pages thanks to U.S. taxpayers, but Japanese Wikipedians in Japan cannot use JAXA’s pictures (and/or most of pictures and photos made by Japanese government agencies) in Japanese Wiki pages thanks to......--Californiacondor 16:55, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • I like this idea, although I don't think this is a money issue (as this sum likely could not be used for this sort of thing) so much as it is a communication issue. We are talking about persuading large governments that have a lot invested in these things to make a major policy shift. A few letters will likely not do it -- it would be great if local chapters of Wikimania were to take this up as worthwhile causes, seeking help from the foundation as necessary and helpful. --Improv 19:26, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • “Liberate” (copylefted by Shanes) “the world knowledge ‘owned’ by the governments and paid with people's money” (copylefted by Cinabrium)! I love that! Delete this message if inappropriate (sorry, but I’m a newbie.). Improv, who are “We” and where is this discussion taking place? I want to be part of this worthwhile cause. Yeah, we don’t need to pay for materials again when taxpayers have already paid for the materials. --Californiacondor 02:55, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

NeuCeu

  • High definition pictures of medieval illuminated manuscripts (for example, low res pictures are available at Bibliothèque nationale de France, but you have de pay for the high res versions).
  • Photo sets of pieces in museums like the Louvre (similar to what was given by DirectMedia for the York Project on Commons).
  • Geodata : map templates, elevation terrain models, hydrographic data, etc.

Mushroom

  • Old manuscripts (to be scanned, transcribed and translated). They are already in the public domain but having free access to them is difficult, and this is a shame. Libraries, archives and universities often make you pay for high quality copies, or retain the copyright to the scanned images, or just refuse to digitize full manuscripts. Creating a new, free digitization project in collaboration with the major manuscript archives in the world would open up this sealed source of knowledge to anyone. If this can't be done, buying a single collection of manuscripts and funding its digitization could be a less expensive alternative.
  • Another idea: abandonware. You could buy discontinued copyrighted software, release it under the GPL and create a free and legal Internet archive for it.
  • And pictures! A free picture for every Wikipedia article, especially for those where it's difficult or impossible to make a new one.

American Patriot 1776

I'll limit my book wishlist to 3:

  • Cold War Secret Nuclear Bunkers By: N.J. McCamley
  • A comprehensive description of continuity of government programs in the Cold War and it's structures. Putting the exact wording of some sections into our articles would greatly augment ur Cold War knowledge.
  • To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift 1948 - 1949 By: Roger G. Miller
  • A wonderful, detailed description of every aspect of the Berlin Airlift. Once again, the precise and gripping language of the book would fit perfectly into several different articles.
  • The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich By: William L. Shirer

Piotrus

  1. Photos' archives, as they are something we most often use and is hardest to reproduce.
  2. Maps, per above.
  3. Film (documentaries) archives?
  4. More archives :)
  5. Perhaps some proprietary software that our devs would like to play with?

--Piotrus 02:39, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Tuf-Kat

The Library of Congress has a wide variety of folk music recordings, such as here, that are public domain (mostly, I think, IANAL) but are not easily available because you gotta pay for an audiocassette - some are downloadable, but not all, and not many of the most interesting ones. I'm not entirely sure how one would go about taking an audiocassette and making it an ogg vorbis file, but I'm sure it's possible. One way or another, we should be able to vastly increase the amount of free, educational folk music available on the Commons and other projects. Note that though this is the Library of Congress, there are recordings from all around the world, not just the US. I know there's a British library or two that also has recordings that are public domain but not easily available, and I suppose many other national libraries probably do as well. Tuf-Kat 03:03, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Kunzite

There would be several ways to go about this. Would you want the contentto be quickly integrated into the Wikisource or Wikipedia? Could you wait seveal months/years for content to be digitized? Digitization is costly in terms of staff time and digitizing works as a collaboration can be done, but it doesn't seem to fit the wiki model. Digitizing items using the collaboration would require physical materials to be sent to someone in order to be digitized. However, Wikimedia may want to outsource or partner with some organizations (archives, libraries, etc...) who want to do this. (example conversion process)

It may be more cost effective to purchase reference material that has been already digitized, batch digitized (which would be a good collabroation project for error correction), or "born digital" and batch integrate it into the collection. This could be something like a photo collection, newspaper items, or a database of biographies on authors. Kunzite -----

Régis Lachaume

It'd be great to have free on-line access to the text of major specialised journals in the field of sciences, arts, and literature. And also to that of most striking novels of the 20th century ! It'd be costly though... 132.248.81.29 17:25, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

MrDarcy

I'd go for history textbooks, preferably more than one on each subject (for NPOV reasons), and especially ones covering non-Western history. We could go beyond textbooks in English and rely on the community to help with interwiki translation. Any textbooks that cover more traditional encyclopedia topics would be great, in fact. Or, if you want to get really crazy, purchase the copyright to an older edition of a dead-tree encyclopedia, like a non-current edition of World Book, with the goal of assimilating all the information on topics that are no longer changing (world history, art history, literary history, etc.). | MrDarcy 03:54, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nojhan

User:Ashibaka

Buy all of Bob Dylan's music. That deserves to be in the public domain.

Seriously, if you want to do something useful, don't buy history textbooks-- anyone can write a history textbook with the proper sources. Buy the primary sources: newspaper archives, firsthand accounts, videos, letters. And although this is more subjective, I wouldn't buy science stuff at all, there's little benefit in having a particular explanation of public domain facts made reprintable. I'd say the best use of money would be to buy huge amounts of out-of-print music and literature, so that they can be better preserved. Ashibaka 15:55, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Let's write our own textbooks; get the valuable stuff before it is lost to time.--HereToHelp (talk) 19:06, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I also agree. History-sources are very important to be free. THOMAS (German Wikipedia)

en:User:Renata3

Thinking big? en:Factiva + en:JSTOR :)

Thinking smaller?

  • Local (i.e. only about one country) or specific (i.e. on medicine, on aviation, on music) encyclopedias. There is nothing new in general encyclopedias (i.e. EB) that WP does not have already.
  • Textbooks, and lots of them. See [2] for $0 textbooks.
  • Image and map archives / libraries.

Renata 17:39, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Californiacondor

Only if lawfully feasible, buy all some photos taken by Ernesto "Che" Guevara when he travled around the world (at least one photo from each country he visted) or all photos depicting him. --Californiacondor 17:06, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Durova

I'd survey tenured professors at major universities and ask for their recommendations, particularly regarding out-of-print titles that they regard in high esteem. This would have several benefits:

  • $100 million could buy a large number of copyrights for useful hard-to-find textbooks and reference works.
  • Wikipedia editors could cite these books to improve articles.
  • Professors could include these works in their assigned course reading without the usual misgivings: students would have free access to them (through Wikiversity?) rather than pay exorbitant prices for new textbooks or wait for short-term access to a single library copy.

Much of this material isn't cost-effective to republish via traditional book publishing and remains unavailable until copyright finally expires. Durova 21:26, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think thats a really cool idea, but how will those poor execs at (major college bookstore chain deleted) buy their new yachts if they can't sell used paperback copies of The Birdcage for 14.95? :) Youngamerican 00:45, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Grahamec

Paintings are especially important. Even paintings that are out of copyright are hard to photograph under gallery rules. --Grahamec 00:16, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think we need to buy old encyclopedias, we can already quote these sources and we should not need to plagiarise them. On the other hand images like paintings and the London Underground map are hard to come by. --Grahamec 04:59, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Shanes

  1. Liberate as much and as recent images/media from as many News agencies as possible. The agencies who liberate their archives know it will give them good publicity, both because they're doing a favour to human mankind, and because the content (with courtesy attribution notes) will be seen by a larger audience, something their marketing departments will like. While the agencies who don't follow will know that the media they own the rights to will now drop in value anyway, since so much is being released by other agencies.
  2. National Geographic media. They have lots of high quality pictures that is very hard for us to get even close to have.
  3. Books and media (images, diagrams, etc) from modern medicine. If we could offer accurate and up to date media that can help people around the world learn modern medicine, that would be huge.

Shanes 01:25, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Neutrality

  1. Textbooks.
  2. Map imagery.
  3. The rights to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for Wikiquote.
  4. The rights to Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative.

--Neutrality 03:50, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Your last entry makes me wonder. The Civil War is the most popular of American wars for publications. The Official Records ... in 128 volumes is already available on a single CD, as are the further 27 volumes of naval operations. Foote's book may give a particular perspective on the war, but I think that before real decisions are made we need to broadly evaluate the literature on a subject. Eclecticology 06:45, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That being said, if Bartlett's is up for grabs as a reasonable cost (and we know it won't be), it's a great idea.--HereToHelp (talk) 19:11, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Riana dzasta

Oh, wow.

  1. Audio
  2. Pictures, especially for biographical articles
  3. Textbooks
  4. Maps
  5. Satellite images
  6. Access to "pay-per-view" journal articles on the web?

— riana_dzasta wreak havoc|damage report 05:06, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

LiquidGhoul

We are in real need of photos of endangered or recently extinct species. We have very few good photos of extinct speices, and we have few endangered speices also. Also, flora/fauna of areas with very few or no Wikipedians, such as New Guinea, areas of South America, etc. I am sure the community could come up with quite a good list of species we are in desperate need of. --LiquidGhoul 14:40, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand this need to buy the rights to other encyclopaedias. We can always use them as a source, and then we have a well referenced article. If we just copied an entire article from an encyclopaedia, it wouldn't make it a featured article. We would need to change it, expand it etc. and it probably wouldn't end up in the same shape in which we bought it. It is much better to use it as one of the sources, then there is less chance of innacuracies getting through. Go to the original source, not another encyclopaedia. Most will be out of date in no time as well, Wikipedia is better for its ability to stay up-to-date. Sounds like a waste of money to me. --LiquidGhoul

Zocky

One word: Britannica. Zocky 17:08, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Can we get the OED too? - TheDaveRoss 22:22, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Andrew Levine

Idea 1: Make a deal with national libraries that hold public-domain content to make it all easily available. For example, the Library of Congress has an extensive collection of mid-20th-century images from Look Magazine, the New York World Telegram, and U.S. News and World Report, which were all donated to the public domain by their copyright-holders, but only a small number are online. Tuf-Kat mentioned above the LoC's collection of folk music recordings for which you have to go through a lengthy process to get a reproduction. Pay the Library of Congress $5,000,000 to have all of these images, recordings, etc. uploaded in high-res format. Do the some with other major national libraries.
Idea 2: Buy the rights to old, specialized encyclopedias which are not yet out of copyright. This would be moot of we got the orphan-works laws passed, but it's a slightly more "down to earth" option. For example, my great-uncle used to have an enormous multi-volume encyclopedia of music that was published in the 1950s, some of it on compositions and composers which probably don't even have Wikipedia articles yet. Chances are, if the publisher even still exists anymore, they'd be willing to part with the rights to a half-century-out-of-date encyclopedia on classical music for less than a half million dollars. If not outright purchasing the material, an agreement to license the text under the GFDL or CC-SA might cost less. Do this with any number of other specialized encyclopedias (focusing on art, history, biographical, etc. Not so much science because that may be too-out-of date to be useful). Then hire some new staffers to upload all of the content to Wikisource. Andrew Levine 21:38, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

user:Qviri

According to my count, fourthed satellite images. For geography articles, we are able to get free (as in license) photographs, create free maps, but satellite imaginery (and what better way to illustrate urban sprawl, light pollution, patterns in human settlement, secret government installations, etc) is a bit out of your average editor's ballpark. --user:Qviri 00:15, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Really? Have you looked at the stuff from Nasa, especially en:World Wind. - FrancisTyers 12:05, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

UNIX SVRx

Buy all (if any) outstanding copyrights to the UNIX source code, on a "bounty" basis. This should not cost very much, since the current copyrights are tenuous. UNIX is seminal, and the current uncertanties about the copyrights are an impedement to the development of new software.

Yaksha

I don't think buying textbooks is such a good idea. Textbooks are an eample of work which we can generate free replacements for. If we can build a free encyclopedia, i don't think textbooks are so far off. All we need is the time, and perhaps more people, to build completely free textbooks.

I think it would be better to put money into buying and freeing works which we trying cannot make replacements for.

  • Primary sources - old photos, pictures, original footage, manuscripts, sheet music, designs, drawings..etc Especially things which could be used to improve our other projects - like replacing Fair Use pictures wikipedia articles with truely free pictures.
  • Things which will help us - softwares like translation software, or things like old newspaper articles, journal archives, earth imagery, etc. which will be useful to wikipedia editors
  • Freeing things which can be incorporated into our projects - like encyclopedias and/or dictionaries. Not nessasarily english ones either - buying rights to encyclopedias and dictionaries in some languages could seriously give a boost to the wikipedia/wikitionary projects in those languages. It would be better than a textbook, which would just be converted into a softcopy and slapped onto wikibooks.

I also think putting some money into advertising and publicity work would be really good. We should

  • encourage people (or groups/companies) to free their own work
  • contact newspapers, journals and other publishing groups to see if we can strike any deals on freeing work of certain years old
  • contacting governments - to quote "A huge pile of content is non-free not because the author wants to control it or profit from it, but for purely historical reasons, negligence, and cluelessness. So I'd propose to spend part of the money on a low-noise, targeted promotional campaign. Mail personalized letters to world governments, various agencies, publishers, all kinds of content creators. Explain, persuade, help them make however much of their content free. I'm sure this will open up more content than outright buying."
  • encouranging places like libariries to get already free work online or more easily avaiable.

--Yaksha 03:19, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Vicarious

User access to solid verifiable peer reviewed material via services such as EBSCO and Proquest. --Vicarious 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, please! User:riana_dzasta 15:27, 22 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

TV News Archive (user THOMAS/German Wikipedia)

I think a TV news archive from the beginning to now would be great. But that's a big job and of course it's very difficult because of the licenses.

Dover Publications

Dover has a very nice assortment of books, some already in the public domain (but already digitalized by them). Buy the rights to their collection.Somoza13:04, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Legal documents

West Publishing holds the copyrights on the legal reporters (volumes of caselaw) that contain the published opinions of state and federal courts in the United States. (In some cases, West can't claim copyright to the opinions themselves, but does claim copyright to the pagination system and the headnotes that to some extent are the basis of the most common forms of legal citation). Making this information publicly available could make it easier for people who do not have easy or affordable access to Westlaw or Lexis/Nexis to research legal points. 38.98.195.226 18:27, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

National Geographic photos

The National Geographic photo library 38.98.195.226 18:27, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

TheDaveRoss

All US Court decisions, of course the Supreme Court being most important, but the rest of them too. - TheDaveRoss 06:32, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikisource:Case law.--HereToHelp (talk) 19:32, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Use for technical images

Technical, high-level drawings and maps. Example: cut-offs of mechanism (planes, locomotives, cars, motors, electronic circuits etc.), plans of industries (i.e. production flows), detailed maps of cities. I think it would not cost so much to acquire the rights of some professional works. Some 3000 drawings would make this encyclopedia stunning. --151.47.101.123 15:41, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A lot of that can be done ourselves, but it's still an interesting idea.

HereToHelp

I think that the money is best used to free some of the best of 20th Century Literature. I'd like to see some good classics available, like:

However, those will probably cost a heck of a lot, and will be out in twenty or thirty (as opposed to seventy) years. Still, their what I put priority on (and may be cheaper because it's a shorter time until the rights holder loses that title, anyway.) Non-fiction is also fine (I like #American Patriot 1776's suggestions), as are #Danny's wishes for equipment to digitize old recordings. (Speaking of which, sound files of classic speeches or musical pieces are also fine by me.) Biblical translations are also good (try to get a clear, modern one; in my opinion, "thys" and "thous" distort the understanding of the text). Textbooks for Wikipedia is also an interesting idea, but we should not use them to simply replace encyclopedia articles, and we should look into citing them (fair use style) first. Images are also an interesting idea, but we manage alright without them. Those should only be bought on a specific, case-to-case basis.

Mieciu K

Just one wish, but a big one. Let's buy the rights to one or more w:Tank Man photographs. Tank Man aka "The unknown rebel" is w:TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Right now many of the wikipedias that do not allow fair use images cannot use tank man photographs Tian'anmen-Massaker (de wiki) 84.10.40.120 01:04, 22 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

en:User:megapixie

  • Buy the GFDL rights to one (or possibly two) un-reproducable news images at the end of every week, could be done via a vote/discussion to decide which image(s) to buy. Probably would be cheap enough that it could be kept going indefinately. Images could be attributed via invariant text to the donar.
  • Work with a number of museums to photograph their collections of objects (not art - but objects) in a professional way. Probably would cost less than $2 million to "rent" and photograph the collections of a dozen major world museums. Images could be attributed via invariant text to the donar.
  • Hire an inhouse graphic artist to work on diagrams/maps full time. Cost would be less than 100k/year - could be continued indefinately. A decent artist could produce in the region of 1,000+ diagrams a year. All work could be attributed to the donor via invariant text.

That's all I can think of right now. Megapixie 13:03, 22 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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