Anyway, after talking with Howcheng, I've decided to show good faith by reopening my gallery. I'd hope that you don't make me regret this.
On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 6:31 PM, Adam Cuerden <[email protected]> wrote: > In short, restoration is not a mechanical process. It requires a great > deal of judgement and artistry. This judgement and artistry is used to > try and repair things in a way that fits in with what existed. This is > why restoration is generally *not* done on one-off, deliberative works > like paintings for commons, but lithographs are a semi-randomly > created process, where etching by acid creates random pits, and the > amount of these pits determines the darkness of that part of the > image, and there will be some variation between copies due to amount > of inking and paper variations. In these gaps, you have enough freedom > to do a restoration, but, outside of the basic stuff like "remove ink > blotches from the white space", there's a necessary level of creative > decision making to decide how to repair. To give obvious, > easy-to-understand examples:in my restoration of Left Hand Bear, where > the corners had been irregularly cut off to round them, in a very > uneven, untidy way. I had to reconstruct those areas, including fixing > some damaged text (Luckily, the LoC notes told me what it should say), > and, on one corner, I actually had to fake some water damage to avoid > misleading the reader by providing fine details about the sleeve that > didn't exist. > > Another good one was my Women's Suffrage restoration, where a big > chunk was simply missing, and I had to recreate the shoulder of a > dress and other incidental details, without which the eye would be > immediately drawn to the damage, and away from the actual image. > > I try to be fair with this. If I've done very little, I explicitly > note this. If you want to say that my Quick and Easy restorations > folder should be considered PD, I'd probably agree with you, in fact, > I believe I've said to consider them PD. But there's a logical fallacy > called the False Continuum: the idea that because there's a fuzzy area > in the middle, there can't be clearcut cases on either end. That seems > to be getting used to argue that no amount of work can ever gain a > copyright (in explicit violation of the text of the PD-scan policy). > Note that that policy also points out that the amount of artistic > decision is very low in the UK. > > Commons can deal with ambiguity. For instance, very simple logos can't > gain copyright? How simple? We don't know, so the bar of how simple is > simply set at a point sufficiently low (text, geometric shapes) that > it's clear cut, which lets Commons benefit from the policy, while > still staying well away from anything that can get us in trouble. > > -Adam Cuerden _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
