David Gerard wrote:
I suspect (as you've noted) that copyright may not
be the right tool
for the job. (It would undoubtedly encourage restorations, but the
cultural price may not be appropriate. But that's getting more to the
philosophical.)
Copyright law is already pretty screwed up; piling a bigger load on that
horse doesn't help.
I think what we need to do - a practical action that
we can do at
present - is more encourage a culture of crediting restorers. This
means naming the restorers, details of the restoration, etc. on the
image pages.
To a point. But how much restoration deserves mention. Some may only be
noticeable at high resolution; for someone whose needs are fulfilled by
a low resolution image the restoration may be of no value.
Noting the restorer is of course best practice, to be
accurate about
image provenance if nothing else. Encouraging third parties to
actually do so is going to be a long and gentle process. It's hard
enough to get media reusers to credit an image with more than
"Wikipedia" when it's under an attribution licence, let alone list any
detail they're not absolutely forced to by law.
Credit to "Wikipedia" is about as much as you can realistically expect.
For the many who don't even realize that they can edit themselves
Wikipedia is only one monolithic entity. The thought process that
distinguishes individual Wikipedia contributors from the monolith only
begins when they become aware of their own ability to edit.
With the spread of free culture, I suspect credit will
become more
common as a social expectation, which is why getting into crediting
restorers is a good thing to start now.
Optimist!!!
Ec