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 cuerden@gmail.com 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