A buyer's market for copyrights?

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, apparently tired of the incessant fighting over copyright and the Internet, has proposed a new method for setting information free: Buy it, and then free it yourself.

In a letter on a Wikipedia mailing list, Wales asked readers to imagine they had a budget of $100 million to use to buy copyrights to be set free.

"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," he wrote.

It's unclear whether those things will actually be loosed from indentured servitude; Wales said the topic was brought up by "someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen," but didn't give any specifics.

While some bloggers immediately starting coughing up ideas, others railed against the very thought of giving in to copyright laws.

Blog community response:

"Rather than spend $100 million to put some small segment of content into the public domain, why not spend that $100 million to educate people on ways that intellectual property needs to be reformed, or on better educating people about the harm that intellectual property monopolies can cause?"
--Techdirt

"Don't fork over money to the copyright industry! This is defeatist and exhibits static world thinking. $100 million could fund a huge amount of new free content, free software, free infrastructure and supporting institutions, begetting more of the same. But if I were a donor with $100 million to give I'd try really hard to quantify my goals and predict the most impactful spending toward those goals."
--Mike Linksvayer

"The fact remains that every service provided by the State must be subsidized and financed through a coercive business model (i.e., a 'public good' is simply a euphemism for socialism). And it is this same coercive model that an IP regime also maliciously operates under."
--Mises.org