Tag Archives: textbooks

Liberating content – with $100 million to spend

What content would you like to see liberated? This invitation has come from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who asks for suggestions of what content should be freed from copyright – with a proposed $100 million budget.

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 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.

This is a tantalising thought for us information-starved people out here on the margins of the world. What would a South African shopping list look like? It is not as if we don’t have a lot of stuff that would be fascinating not only to us but to the world at large. I suspect, for example, that in our recent history, there are documents and archives in our liberatiion history that should be in the public domain and accessible to all. Or are there heritage collections that are currently locked up? Art or music archives? Can we draw up a wish-list?

Tracked from the Boing-Boing blog