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Jimmy Wales asks us to dream the impossible dream

Well, maybe not impossible, but big. Real BIG!

He has posted this comment on the Wikipedia mailing list:

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

Well, shiver me timbers.

This is fantastic. Beating the big media companies at their own game'o'greed by asking them to name a price and paying it.

Hopefully we (the commons) will get to free as much copyright material (I'm thinking its all stuff form the first half of the last century anyway...) and set a precedent before the big media companies decide to put a match to our digital library of Alexandria to do away with their accounting nightmare.

Jimmy Wales is a God. First he stands up to China, and wins, and now this! Is there nothing this man cannot achieve?!!

:)

This is the full text of the post but you can follow the subsequent discussion at the mailing list here

There is also a 'meta' page on Wikipedia itself (not sure of the meta terminology...)

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