Topps Vault And Me And Jay Kleven 1976
Pegasus, my relationship to Topps is historical consultant and a kind of unofficial liaison between them and the baseball history/baseball photography communities. I've spent a long time convincing them to take a blase attitude towards what they view as their implicit copyright on all their images, and I've generally be successful. They've come around to the view that the posting of the watermarked images serves as advertising for their product, especially their eBay business.
So anything with a watermark is fair game. The other stuff gets dicey. It's basically a question of volume and use. If they're "out" as your non-watermarked images from '06 would be, they could make a stink but won't. Posting of stuff obtained via Topps Vault or scrubbed of the watermark is the issue. I've talked them back from zero tolerance to "don't over do it." Their real problems are with the posting of unwatermarked Topps images of players whose photos could make money for some Internet rando who comes here and picks off the Koufax you posted, or the unwatermarked images posted in the design of actual Topps cards.
There's no hard and fast rule. The best advice is, less is better.
Speaking of which, here is a TV of Jay Kleven, who spent about two weeks as a backup catcher for the '76 Mets and appears in today's Vault upload:
|