On 2012-07-08 14:06, Adam Cuerden wrote:
* No, I am not looking for exclusive commercial
rights. If I was, I
would hardly be putting them under a CC-by license.
Thanks for these clarifications. What you write here is something
often heard from museums. After learning about Creative Commons,
people get all busy with picking the right license. But "putting" (or
releasing) something under a CC license requires that there is a
copyright to begin with, and only the owner of that copyright can
put something under a CC license. So when you want to put your work
under CC-BY, you must start by asserting that "this work is covered
by copyright, owned by me". To win that argument, you should
probably upload both the original, damaged image, marked as PD,
and your restored version, marked as a work of your own copyright.
People who want the PD image can then use the damaged original, at
their own loss. It can still be argued whether your restoration is
creative enough to merit copyright, but clearly indicating the
difference should make your case easier.
Still, winning the argument is not done by reaching a compromise
on this mailing list. We're just a bunch of individuals. There is
no Wikipedia that "wants" or "thinks" something. Even if we all
were to agree that the moon is made from blue cheese, someone
with a differing opinion can appear on Commons tomorrow, and the
argument starts over. Only time and court decisions can tell which
legal interpretation will prevail. (I don't agree with Cary Bass
that there is any "bad" law. There is only law that prevails, and
law that gets overturned.)
The OpenStreetMap project wants to be the Wikipedia of maps, using
CC-BY-SA or a similar license. But because they found it hard to
assert copyright over a database of coordinates, which is what the
content of OpenStreetMap is, they are now in the middle of a very
complex change of license, based on a mix of laws, not only copyright.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se