Interesting discussion happening at Wikipedia that started with this posting :

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.

Lots of great ideas here. I’d vote for Lexis-Nexis, JSTOR, The Web of Science, or some other repository of knowledge locked behind a subscription wall. That is, assuming the money can only be used to buy out rights. I think a better use of the money would be to invest in equipment and an infrastructure to permanently archive as much public domain material as they can get their hands on. Old encyclopedias, wax cylinders, maps, sheet music, speeches, rapidly-decaying film negatives, newspapers, the entire Congressional record, academic journals, plays, letters, novels, etc. should all be digitized for prosperity, indexed, and thrown online. Why give the money to some misers who want to hoard information when there’s a ton of information being swept into history’s dustbin?