Hi Adam and everybody,
On 08-Jul-2012, at 12:06 PM, Adam Cuerden wrote:
Do forgive me if the threading is a bit messed up on this, but Seth asks a question that I feel I should answer:
Adam, I am unclear exactly what rights and protections you would like on your work. I am not qualified to comment on the legalities of the matter, especially regarding international copyright law.
Setting aside the law for a moment, are you looking for exclusive commercial rights for your restoration work? are you looking for legally enforceable authorship citation rights? Are you happy/unhappy with having your work appear on WikiCommons? Are you interested in derivative works?
In order:
- No, I am not looking for exclusive commercial rights. If I was, I
would hardly be putting them under a CC-by license.
- While I recognise that it may not apply in the United states, and
that such power should be used carefully, yes, I would like legally eenforcable authorship citation rights.
- If Commons stops trying to change a CC-by license to a PD one, I'm
fine with Commons having the works. I don't actually *like* Commons much, but at the same time, I do think that the resources should be available to students/teachers/historians/etc, etc, and that a part of making these resources easily usable is waiving the right to commercial gain on my part.
- If people want to further edit them, they can feel free.
This is awesome, Adam -- thanks so much for making your work freely available! Maybe we could reach a compromise in which the "Permissions" of your uploads could read, "This image was restored from [[Image:other|Image title]] and restored by [[User:Adam Cuerden|Adam Cuerden]]. The original image is in the public domain in the US/UK as its creator died in XXXX. The restored image has been licensed under a CC-BY license; in some countries, these restorations may not qualify for independent copyright and would fall into the public domain.". Then it would be up to the users as to how they choose to reuse the image. The image would be categorized and tagged as a CC-BY image, but the text would make it clear that public domain use of this image might be possible in certain jurisdictions.
The downside of this is that it'll be possible for people in the US (or anywhere else) to claim that Adam's copyright claim does not stand under UK law; however, they can do this now, and Adam doesn't have any recourse apart from the courts. However, it does record his claim, credits his work, allows users to quickly find the indisputably-public-domain image behind the restoration, and ensures that the restored images' copyright restriction of at most CC-BY is recognized. And most importantly, it makes Adam happy, so we can continue to use his modifications of these images.
Incidentally, there's a *very* detailed analysis of where originality begins in image restoration at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Images_from_Darw... which I don't think has been brought up in this thread yet.
cheers, Gaurav