I agree with Matt Mattus that the benefits of reaching a wide audience can outweigh the potential loss of income from certain types of intellectual property. However, as an editor who has worked with hundreds of authors over the years and with various publishers, I would also say that the decision to make text and images readily available for reuse should be up to the creator. Some writers and photographers (including myself) don't depend on their work for income and are unconcerned about its fate once we release it into the public sphere. Those who want to keep control of their work because it is their source of income or for some non-economic reason should refrain from putting it online except in forms that cannot easily be copied and used further. It is also possible to sell content online, or even to make content available only by paid subscription, as publishers of journals and major reference works now do. I am not a particularly good photographer, but like some other correspondents here, I've noticed a few of my photos taken from the wiki and used elsewhere. This doesn't bother me, but we editors are hardened to going without credit. Plenty of my writing has gone into print under other people's names. (Did you know I was an expert on the religious history of Yemen? Or anyway, that I quickly wrote an encyclopedia entry on it, having been provided with a stack of research material by a desperate project editor.) It almost seems that the era of control of intellectual property was a passing phase in the long history of art and literature. Unauthorized translation, imitation, and blatant plagiarism were so common up to two centuries ago that studying the subject has become its own subdiscipline. I think we just have to make ourselves comfortable in the new Republic of Letters and Images, or move to a private island. Jane McGary Portland, Oregon, USA