newsblurb: October 2006 Archives

Interesting proposition from Wikipedia founder J. Wales, about what could you do with $100,000,000, in terms of freeing copyrights, with a teaser of the possibility of it becoming reality:

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.

Reminds me of a thing in Charlie Stross' latest book, where the protagonist regularly patents new business ideas and then immediately donates the profitable ones to a foundation that manages free distribution of the concepts.

(found via boingboing)