It strikes me that the fundamental issue that the freedophiles have no answer to is: regardless of the subtleties of copyright law, when someone goes to effort and expense to make something available that was not otherwise available, why do they consider it their right to take the fruits of that labour for nothing?
It seems to me that the Commons copyfraud statement is essentially typical American arrogance of imposing American standards on the rest of the world (because, regardless of it being an international effort, Wikipediots invariably fall back on an American view of how things should be done and assume that other points of view are irrelevant). I wonder, however, what they feel about China and Russia's approach to copyright on American designs where they take a more carefree view? The copyfraud statement essentially legitimises cross-border theft, yet the same approach is taken by Russia to ignore other countries' claims on copyright.
A further issue is that there is a loss of value as soon as such pictures get into Wikipedia - fundamentally it is a question of being a reliable source. Once in the Commons, people are free to hack about. Sourced from the NPG for example, we have a reasonable expectation that the picture is what it claims to be. There can be no assumption that in 1, 5, 20 or 100 years the Wikipediots have enough common sense to ensure that the Commons repository is not corrupted - Wikipediots with the zeal to colorize photographs in grey, or de-speckle a picture of [Insert freckly person of your era here] so rather than free pictures we have corrupted information.
Another minor point with regard to re-digitization, the music industry tends to renew copyright when they do a re-master of their product, even though the intent is to produce something that sounds exactly like the original only more so.
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