Okay, time fore some responses. Let me remind you that this subthread began with an example of reconstructing missing parts of the image from ones own creativity, to find a solution around an original which had been cut into an irregular shape with scissors, and where no other copy was, or was likely to ever be, available: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2012-July/006588.html There's a lot of other restoration work in the example image, but, for simplicity's sake, let's look at that, because, on its face, creating new parts of the image seems an obvious example exercising creativity. This was, by the way, as part of an attempt to work out a compromise, in which we could begin to discuss possible bright line rules, for instance, if a largish area has had to be recreated in the style of the original by the restorer, the restorer can claim copyright, but I should waive any possible rights to it if the restoration work was primarily focused on work at a very small scale, where creative possibilities are limited by what's around the damage.
However, this has been completely sidetracked at this point. What were the responses to this by Cary and David? To ignore the actual issues raised. Cary and David basically argue that because the goal is to reproduce the original, this means originality of expression doesn't exist. This is false. First of all, let's talk about philosophy of restoration. It's very rare that a restorer will have multiple copies of a work to work from, so if information is missing - damage, misprinting, etc, there's no way to know exactly what was there. Further, in most cases the goal is to produce the best possibly copy of the artistic intent of the original. Example: Large wood block prints for ephemera such as newspapers, often have gaps and misalignments caused by imperfect gluing together of multiple blocks used to make the image (and possibly due to rushing of the artists who make the blocks - I'm never quite sure on that point). These are there in all original prints, and no original print lacks them. This was certainly not the artistic intent, however, and they tend to distract from the image for all uses besides learning about wood block prints in ephemeral publications. It can take a great deal of judgement and care to remove them, but this does not produce the original, this produces an idealised original. Likewise, scratches on the image may be later additions, they may be flaws in the wood/metal/etc, or they may be mistakes made by a careless apprentice. Keeping the original might mean leaving the scratch in, however, to produce an idealised original, you remove it. A hand-tinted image may have tint that bleeds outside the colour boundaries to fix. The border may have gaps in it due to the wood having chipped when it was being made. And if you have to reconstruct part of the image, unless a guide exists (and it almost never does), only a bad restoration would fail to put in substantial creative work. It's absolutely necessary to create something that resembles the original style, but you can't just move another part of the picture in without modification - you need to carefully create something new out of elements of the image - a clear case of creative input that has nothing to do with a straw man "it's only a sweat of the brow claim that could grant copyright." No, that goes way beyond sweat of the brow. The goal of (most) restorations is to create an idealised version, not to slavishly copy the original. The style and flaws inherent to the artist are (with rare exceptions) kept - this is an idealization of a real work - but you are not trying for an exact copy of the original. The exact copy of the original is merely a colour-adjusted scan. Cary Bass claims that the better the restoration, the more it resembles the original. This is simply untrue, and the attempts to idealise the original can involve substantial creative input. Further, as is well-known, the UK threshhold for creative input is very low. Cary and David are simply wrong to suggest that a restoration would necessarily fail to reach this level,. particularly one that had to reconstruct sections. David and Cary completely ignore the reconstruction aspect - which, since, as I said, one almost never has multiple copies to consider, has to be done out of the restorer's artistic talent - in order to claim that there is no creative work in a restoration. This is false, and shows they don't actually understand the situation being discussed, despite me having shown a before-and-after visual aid of an image that had reasonably large sections reconstructed. But, no, they're sticking their fingers in their ears on that subject, and just repeating "Sweat of the brow! Sweat of the brow!" as if the discussion had never moved on from there, and as if *the very subthread they're commenting on* wasn't explicitly about reconstructing areas of the image from whole cloth. -Adam Cuerden _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
