*When there is a picture of a painting; changing the
colours is BAD. A photo
reflects what the picture looks like. Changing the colours arbitrarily
because it "looks good" is falsifying what the picture is about.
The colours reflected in a photograph are not nessecarily the "true
colour" of the object. It depends on lighting, and on the individual
camera. Thus, a photo of a painting may look differently than if you
were to put the painting in a flatbed scanner (not a good idea for,
say, van Gogh's Starry Night).
If somebody's changes are an attempt to get closer to the true colour,
or to fix irregularities in the colour, then I think it's OK.
If, however, they're changing a colour saying "Well, yes, that's the
colour it is in the actual painting, but I think the painting would
look better if it were this colour so I'm going to just change it".
What I mean is, colour changes such as hue, brightness, etc., are one
thing; arbitrarily changing all of the pinks to reds is quite another.
*There is a lot of resistance to websites that use
Wikipedia material
commercially without them making due reference to the original site an
original author. This resulted in the inclusion of watermarks that were then
deleted.
That's one of the things that you have to deal with when you're a free
content provider. While sites are SUPPOSED to make due reference, they
don't nessecarily, even though that's really not lawful (I don't
think). Obviously, we're not going to sue every last one of them,
which would be pretty pointless since we don't lose any money when
people don't view our site anyhow (except for the fact that they may
not see donation banners).
We don't write "WIKIPEDIA" in between every word on Wikipedia
articles, why should we do the same for images?
Mark