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.