Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Dear Wikimedia,

As Charlie Collins and I are finalizing GWT in Practice, something occurred to me. As authors after a certain number of years, the copyright on our book will revert to us. It seems to me WikiBooks.org should have an "escrow" option. We submit our book to WikiBooks with a release date, that matches the date our copyright reverts to us. At that point, you can make the content freely available to the world.

Granted, our book, and I suspect a lot of books will be out of date by that point, but I can imagine they would still be useful. I know my now ancient copy of Danny Goodman's JavaScript Bible stills sees regular use. Moreover, an escrow in this form would help to clear up the lingering questions of copyright ownership for out of print books in general. For things that are mostly time-sensitive, a bing able to grant a preset license under the GFDL would be great.

Just a thought,

Robert Cooper