Wikipedia considering purchasing copyrighted content for free distribution

The people behind Wikipedia are now considering plans to purchase rights to copyrighted content and distributing it under public domain.

Jimmy Wales, founder and chairman of Wikimedia Foundation spoke on this new development: “It’s not a project yet, but an idea.”

The Wikipedia community also just recently received an email from Wales asking for suggestions on what content they can purchase for such kind of free distribution.

The email said: “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.”

Wales added: “After contemplating what we would like to see made free, we will begin a project of finding ways to make this happen.”

However, they have not made it clear yet on where they would finance these purchases. The foundation currently relies on community donations.