Who owns Wikipedia?, I am not a lawyer Options

[Peter Damian]

I've heard claims here occasionally that Wikipedia could be sold off. Is that possible? Who actually owns it? What is it they actually own? Could anyone get their hands on it and make a ton of money from ? What would they be getting their hands on?

[TungstenCarbide]

I've heard claims here occasionally that Wikipedia could be sold off. Is that possible? Who actually owns it? What is it they actually own? Could anyone get their hands on it and make a ton of money from ? What would they be getting their hands on?

You have to identify what has value. The content is opensource, as is the site's software. You can grab both at any time and launch your own project. So they don't have any marketable value. The hardware is probably a few million, owned by the foundation.

What has real value is the traffic, but only in the context of commercializing it with advertisement and other schemes. Some have estimated that potential value in the billions.

[thekohser]

I've heard claims here occasionally that Wikipedia could be sold off. Is that possible? Who actually owns it? What is it they actually own? Could anyone get their hands on it and make a ton of money from ? What would they be getting their hands on?

Not to be snide, but why is any of this important?

I would summarize the answers as such:

Is that possible? In business and law, anything is possible.

Who actually owns it? The Wikimedia Foundation owns the trademark to the name, while the authors of the content own the content, but they have irrevocably released the content under the terms of a free license.

What is it they actually own? The Foundation owns the trademark name "Wikipedia". The content authors own the right to forever demand that anyone who ever uses or modifies their content should do so with proper attribution and releasing the content again, in kind, under the same licensing terms. In other words, not much.

Could anyone get their hands on it and make a ton of money from ? Depends on your definition of "ton". I think an entity like Google could have the size and influence to take the content of Wikipedia, enhance it (think, Google Maps, Google Translate, etc.), polish it, and make it less vulnerable to nonsense. But that will only make significant money for Google if they were to simultaneously deprecate "Wikipedia.org" results in their search engine algorithms.

What would they be getting their hands on? Depends on whether you're talking about a Wikipedia takeover or a Wikimedia Foundation takeover. It's possible to disband a non-profit, but generally, the assets have to go to another non-profit.

Which reminds me... remember how the Omidyar Network has that squirrelly dual status of being both a for-profit and a non-profit venture capital firm? And remember who won a seat on the WMF board simultaneous to a $2 million "donation" to the Foundation?

[Ottava]

I've heard claims here occasionally that Wikipedia could be sold off. Is that possible?

Why would anyone want to buy it? It is already CC-BY-SA-3.0. That means anyone can take the stuff, repackage it, and make money.

It is like marrying the town slut who promises to do anything sexual for anyone at any time. Would you really want to marry her? Maybe someone is crazy enough, but I am sure they are prepared for the diseases that will surely come with it.

[Kelly Martin]

Greg pretty much nailed it: the main transactable item of value related to Wikipedia is the name itself, more specifically the trademark "Wikipedia" and the (related) domain names of wikipedia.org and wikipedia.com. The Foundation currently holds all of these things and could dispose of them if it so saw fit, but the proceeds of such a sale would remain trapped within the Foundation and could only be used for purposes consistent with its tax-exempt status and purpose as declared in its charter and bylaws, or else conveyed to some other tax-exempt entity (or escheated to the state).

The Foundation is also in possession of various information that is potentially valuable (such as page access statistics) that it presently does not share publicly and could theoretically monetize, but it has shown little interest in doing so, possibly because doing so could jeopardize its charitable status, not to mention piss off its customer base.

[Peter Damian]

Who owns the fact that when I Google anything it goes to that place?

That is worth a ton of money. As you have all commented, the content itself can easily be copied.

It's the name, i.e. the brand, and the fact that every search gets there. Who owns that? Could it be bought?

If 'it' were bought, would there be anger? Would people feel something had been stolen from them? Who?

Greg pretty much nailed it: the main transactable item of value related to Wikipedia is the name itself, more specifically the trademark "Wikipedia" and the (related) domain names of wikipedia.org and wikipedia.com. The Foundation currently holds all of these things and could dispose of them if it so saw fit, but the proceeds of such a sale would remain trapped within the Foundation and could only be used for purposes consistent with its tax-exempt status and purpose as declared in its charter and bylaws, or else conveyed to some other tax-exempt entity (or escheated to the state).

Could members of the Foundation be paid a large sum of money to dispose of 'it' for well-below market value? Market value is defined by having a site such that any search on anything gets to 'it'.

I've heard claims here occasionally that Wikipedia could be sold off. Is that possible?

Why would anyone want to buy it? It is already CC-BY-SA-3.0. That means anyone can take the stuff, repackage it, and make money.

It is like marrying the town slut who promises to do anything sexual for anyone at any time. Would you really want to marry her? Maybe someone is crazy enough, but I am sure they are prepared for the diseases that will surely come with it.

No 'it' is not CC-BY-SA-3.0. 'It' is owning something that brings every search into 'it'. Town slut is fine. If I bought it I would get rid of the lowlife scum who hang around her and treat her like a princess. More like a call-girl or high-class hooker. Maybe even a princess.

It's possible to disband a non-profit, but generally, the assets have to go to another non-profit.

Why do the assets have to go to another non-profit? In the UK, the Church commissioners can sell off an old church to property developers. Can WMF sell Wikipedia? I mean the name, and the URL and 'it'. A bit like a church on a valuable site in mid-town.

Sorry, I'm mixing up metaphors again (hookers, churches, oh well).

[edit] I looked at the UK rules, and the charity commission has to give permission for disposal of property. I don't know if there is equivalent legislation for 'it'.

This post has been edited by Peter Damian:

[Ottava]

No 'it' is not CC-BY-SA-3.0. 'It' is owning something that brings every search into 'it'. Town slut is fine. If I bought it I would get rid of the lowlife scum who hang around her and treat her like a princess. More like a call-girl or high-class hooker. Maybe even a princess.

I was going to say that, like a hooker, you couldn't ignore her past - i.e. you couldn't re-license the content without approval...

but that happened already, didn't it?

[gomi]

Legally, the Wikimedia Foundation (or whatever it is called) owns Wikipedia.

Owning Wikipedia means these things:

1) Owning the trademarks, domain names, logos, and assorted intellectual property associated with Wikipedia and its related sites;
2) Owns the right to make agreements of any sort, including exclusive ones, surrounding and affecting its online systems and services;
3) Owns the right (subject to the limitations of a not-for-profit organization) to dispose of (by sale, license, or other agreement) any of its assets, including (potentially) any of the Wikipedia sites and related marks and materials.

This is not an exhaustive list. The Wikimedia Foundation would be within its right to sell the Wikipedia site to a for-profit company in exchange for a revenue stream. That for-profit company could shut down all user accounts and install advertising if they wanted to. The resulting revenue stream would (for a time) be very substantial. The Wikimedia Foundation would need to use the proceeds from such a sale for its charitable purpose.

There are potential complications if such a sale is construed as disposing of "substantially all" of its assets, or if it didn't get a fair market value for the asset, but those are details.

I'm not saying this is likely to happen, but it is all legally possible.

[Peter Damian]

Legally, the Wikimedia Foundation (or whatever it is called) owns Wikipedia.

Owning Wikipedia means these things:

1) Owning the trademarks, domain names, logos, and assorted intellectual property associated with Wikipedia and its related sites;
2) Owns the right to make agreements of any sort, including exclusive ones, surrounding and affecting its online systems and services;
3) Owns the right (subject to the limitations of a not-for-profit organization) to dispose of (by sale, license, or other agreement) any of its assets, including (potentially) any of the Wikipedia sites and related marks and materials.

This is not an exhaustive list. The Wikimedia Foundation would be within its right to sell the Wikipedia site to a for-profit company in exchange for a revenue stream. That for-profit company could shut down all user accounts and install advertising if they wanted to. The resulting revenue stream would (for a time) be very substantial. The Wikimedia Foundation would need to use the proceeds from such a sale for its charitable purpose.

There are potential complications if such a sale is construed as disposing of "substantially all" of its assets, or if it didn't get a fair market value for the asset, but those are details.

I'm not saying this is likely to happen, but it is all legally possible.

My emphasis. The user accounts would be the first to go. Can I buy all this outright or am I, as it were, leasing it?

Who makes the decision? The trustees? If I were to write each of them a large cheque, would they vote the right way? Everyone like money.

The Wikimedia Foundation would need to use the proceeds from such a sale for its charitable purpose.

Yes they can expand the WMF brand in other countries and to that bringing the sum of human knowledge crap with all that money.

[edit] Just to make it clear I am not completely stupid (only a bit). I do realise there are two aspects to this transaction. (1) To pay off the various lowlifes in charge of this mess to do the right thing. This would have to be very discrete and secret. (2) To pay the WMF a reasonable value for the assets in question, i.e. the brand, the servers, all that rubbish. I would go to a large bank, Goldmans are reputable and honest and have experience in this kind of thing, and they would lend me a large amount of money to do this (hopefully not too large, but this depends on (1) above). Then the income stream from the advertising pays the bank debt, as well as a handsome profit. I would hire all the professional staff from proper encyclopedias so there was a proper editorial board. They would delete all the shit and pornography and Pokemon. Then I would have really done a good job in bringing the sum of all human knowledge to everyone on the planet, and make a few bucks for myself.

Does anyone know who I would approach? I would leave a message on jimbo's page but not sure he anything to do with it. Also needs to be discrete.

Anyone from the WMF reading this please feel free to PM me and we can talk business, absolute discretion assured.

This post has been edited by Peter Damian:

[A User]

Why would anyone want to buy it? It is already CC-BY-SA-3.0. That means anyone can take the stuff, repackage it, and make money.

You do realise that the licensing conditions can change? If wikipedia ever went up for sale to commercial interests, it's likely the new owner would change the license to reflect that.

[radek]

I've heard claims here occasionally that Wikipedia could be sold off. Is that possible?

Why would anyone want to buy it? It is already CC-BY-SA-3.0. That means anyone can take the stuff, repackage it, and make money.

It is like marrying the town slut who promises to do anything sexual for anyone at any time. Would you really want to marry her? Maybe someone is crazy enough, but I am sure they are prepared for the diseases that will surely come with it.

As the others said it's the brand name. And even though that's "intangible" it can be worth quite a lot of money - consider that people who purchase fast-food restaurant franchises pay A LOT of dough simply to be able to use the logo/brand name, and that buying a fast food franchise, making a hefty upfront payment and then coughing up a good portion of your monthly revenue to the "parent company" STILL is a safer and probably a higher return investment (details depend on the local market), on average, then starting your own restaurant under a brand name of your choosing.

You might not like it, but Wikipedia's worth a buttload of money, despite the fact that all its content is "free" and reproducible.

[dogbiscuit]

Why would anyone want to buy it? It is already CC-BY-SA-3.0. That means anyone can take the stuff, repackage it, and make money.

You do realise that the licensing conditions can change? If wikipedia ever went up for sale to commercial interests, it's likely the new owner would change the license to reflect that.

Gracenote (ex CDDB) worked that trick successfully.

[Ottava]

Why would anyone want to buy it? It is already CC-BY-SA-3.0. That means anyone can take the stuff, repackage it, and make money.

You do realise that the licensing conditions can change? If wikipedia ever went up for sale to commercial interests, it's likely the new owner would change the license to reflect that.

I posted what you said above a good 45 minutes before you posted.



Dogbiscuit

Gracenote (ex CDDB) worked that trick successfully.

I didn't know that Gracenotes use to be a slut. ;/

This post has been edited by Ottava:

[carbuncle]

I was going to say that, like a hooker, you couldn't ignore her past - i.e. you couldn't re-license the content without approval...

but that happened already, didn't it?

I don't care about your past
I just want my love to last
I don't care about your faults
I just want to satisfy your pulse

[thekohser]

Does anyone know who I would approach? I would leave a message on jimbo's page but not sure he anything to do with it. Also needs to be discrete.

Anyone from the WMF reading this please feel free to PM me and we can talk business, absolute discretion assured.

Peter, I am willing to credit each and every one of the WMF board members with enough intelligence and street smarts to know better than to go brokering some kind of "discrete" deal with someone who's trying to coordinate it by publicly asking questions he doesn't know the answer to, and who imagines "leaving a message on Jimbo's page" might have any favorable impact on the success of the highly volatile and risky gambit that you propose.

What happens when you line up 45% of the board, but then the next trustee you try to get to follow suit goes to the Associated Press and Slashdot with the whole story?

You know I have every respect for you, but you're sounding a bit bonkers here. Are you drinking large mugs of mead, or something?

[TungstenCarbide]

As the others said it's the brand name... You might not like it, but Wikipedia's worth a buttload of money, despite the fact that all its content is "free" and reproducible.

No, it's not the brand name. It's the traffic's potential add revenue. There isn't much else of value. Nobody cares about the brand-name, it's value is negligible compared to potential revenue of Wikipedia's traffic.

This post has been edited by TungstenCarbide:

[Kelly Martin]

This is not an exhaustive list. The Wikimedia Foundation would be within its right to sell the Wikipedia site to a for-profit company in exchange for a revenue stream. That for-profit company could shut down all user accounts and install advertising if they wanted to. The resulting revenue stream would (for a time) be very substantial. The Wikimedia Foundation would need to use the proceeds from such a sale for its charitable purpose.

And, in fact, it would probably have to do this if it wanted to monetize the site, because of the restrictions on charities receiving income from business activities. The wholly owned for-profit subsidiary would have to pay corporate income taxes, and distribute some or all of the retained earnings after taxes back to its parent nonprofit. (See also the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation.) Arguably Wikipedia should have been set up this way in the first place.

[radek]

As the others said it's the brand name... You might not like it, but Wikipedia's worth a buttload of money, despite the fact that all its content is "free" and reproducible.

No, it's not the brand name. It's the traffic's potential add revenue. There isn't much else of value. Nobody cares about the brand-name, it's value is negligible compared to potential revenue of Wikipedia's traffic.

Cause and effect. It's the brand name. That is the value. No brand name no traffic, even with all the google support and all that. Traffic is the RESULT of the brand name.

[anthony]

This is not an exhaustive list. The Wikimedia Foundation would be within its right to sell the Wikipedia site to a for-profit company in exchange for a revenue stream. That for-profit company could shut down all user accounts and install advertising if they wanted to. The resulting revenue stream would (for a time) be very substantial. The Wikimedia Foundation would need to use the proceeds from such a sale for its charitable purpose.

And, in fact, it would probably have to do this if it wanted to monetize the site, because of the restrictions on charities receiving income from business activities. The wholly owned for-profit subsidiary would have to pay corporate income taxes, and distribute some or all of the retained earnings after taxes back to its parent nonprofit. (See also the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation.) Arguably Wikipedia should have been set up this way in the first place.

They just never should have applied for 501©(3) status in the first place. It was a mistake to ask for it, and it was a mistake for the IRS to grant it.

A taxable non-profit corporation would have been much better (and much simpler than the Mozilla setup). Basically, they'd set up the WMF just the way they did, not apply for 501©(3), and file a regular 1120 each year. Donations wouldn't be deductible, but I'd guess that most small donations aren't deductible anyway (most US citizens don't itemize), and the large donations could be replaced by advertising/sponsorships (which generally *are* deductible as business expenses). Yes, they'd have to pay taxes on their net income, but in the end they're going to eventually spend it all anyway, and they could possibly argue that the donations were non-taxable as either gifts or capital contributions (I don't know, that'd have to be run past a tax pro smarter than I). And a carefully structured taxable LLC would have probably been the best, though that would have had to have been carefully structured by a tax-savvy lawyer or a lawyer working closely with a tax expert.

All in hindsight, of course. Except for the idea of making Wikipedia into a non-profit in the first place. I still don't entirely understand that. Even under the asset protection theory, I don't see why they couldn't have achieved the same thing in an LLC instead of a nonprofit organization.

This post has been edited by anthony:

[anthony]

As the others said it's the brand name... You might not like it, but Wikipedia's worth a buttload of money, despite the fact that all its content is "free" and reproducible.

No, it's not the brand name. It's the traffic's potential add revenue. There isn't much else of value. Nobody cares about the brand-name, it's value is negligible compared to potential revenue of Wikipedia's traffic.

Whoever has the trademark has the right to take the domain name. And whoever has the domain name gets the traffic, at least until people switch to a fork and enough of the links get updated to kill the Google Juice (would take years).

This post has been edited by anthony: