Quote:
Originally Posted by Merkle923
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:
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Merkle,
Here's my take on your comments.
Please point out where you think I'm wrong.
Unclear to me why anyone is posting these watermarked Topps photos.
Doesn't anyone notice that there's this big, ugly watermark on the photo that ruins it?
Presumably that's the idea of the watermark - to ruin the photo.
As far as the value of photos that never had the watermark or had the watermark "scrubbed" - there is virtually no value.
Digital images have no value.
If they did, Topps would be selling them.
As a matter of fact, the people posting them here would be selling them rather than posting them for nothing.
In fact, even 8x10 glossies have very little value.
They mainly sell to get autographs put on them.
And their value is little more, if anything, than the cost of materials and shipping and handling.
Since most of the guys whose pictures are being posted here are dead, you probably couldn't give away most of the 8x10 glossies of these guys let alone digital images of them.
Topps tried selling digital photos and got nowhere.
The stuff Topps is selling is artifacts.
Autographed photos (the autograph gives them the value), orginal negatives, color slides with Certificates of Authenticity..
Digital photos, whether the watermark is on them or not, doesn't impct the value of these artifacts
Topps isn't selling photos that are not artifacts, no one is buying them that way.
That leaves card sets.
Topps already sold card sets of these players forty or fifty years ago.
These pictures were the discards, the ones that didn't make it into the sets.
Topps hasn't made any more card sets of these guys because there are no buyers.
Card sets of current players are a hard sell right now let alone let alone cards of guys from forty or fifty years ago.
Also, it's doubtful that anyone else is going to try to sell card sets of these old guys because, let's face it, if Topps figures it can't turn a buck on them, why would someone else even try.
If Topps thought they could turn a buck on making card sets out of these pictures, they would have done it. It's been fifty years, if they could make money off of it, they would have made the sets by now.
Therefore, based on the above, how is Topps losing money by anyone posting digital pictures of their stuff, watermarked or unwatermarked.
You could make a case for it actually being a selling point for the artifacts that they're selling that someone is actually bothering to make old Topps fascimile cards out of them - it shows that folks still have interest in these old pictures to some degree.
There's also one other thing. The folks who were alive back then were expecting to see these pictures made into cards. The photographers, the players, the owners of the company back then. They were taking the pictures to make cards for millions of kids - not for a few rich old guys who can plunk down $40 a pop for these things. Also, back then, the folks were actually involved in the taking of the pictures (players, photographers, owners) had no expectation that their progeny would ever be able to restrict their use later on. Copyright laws were only fifteen years back then, not the Draconian seventy five years that the Regan administration foisted on us in the Eighties in his role as the ultimate reverse Robin Hood (stealing from the masses and giving to the rich).