Comments on: Vintage Nudes, Restored

By: Bacchus

Bacchus — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:39:29 +0000

Awesome, thank you!

By: John D.

John D. — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:43:40 +0000

Hi Bacchus,

You’ve made a great point with regards to the original scans – they are no more mine than they are yours, or anyone else in the public domain. I’ve replaced the images with non-watermarked versions.

Best regards,

John

By: Bacchus

Bacchus — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 07:55:03 +0000

It’s not really about rights, Anne. Once we’re talking about what people are doing with intellectual property they didn’t create, it’s more like ethics or manners than a rights question. And there’s a lot his intellectual property in the restorations, so I don’t have a problem with his logos on those — they are, in a substantial if partial sense, his creation, even if the copyright law might not acknowledge that.

But the original scans? To my eye, slapping your logo on somebody else’s photo is kinda rude.

I routinely crop, rotate, filter, and do minor cleanup on the old images I post on ErosBlog. And these images are routinely “stolen” by other blogs, often without any credit back here. The temptation to slap an ErosBlog logo on these things is always strong in me. But it just doesn’t feel right, because there’s more in the work that I didn’t create than there is that I did. But we’re talking usually a few minute’s improvement work. If I spent many painstaking hours, I might feel differently.

By: Anne Onymous

Anne Onymous — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 04:56:13 +0000

How about the restorations? Do you think he has the right to put his logo on them? And you are sooo lucky that you get emails like this. All I get is spam… On the other hand, I don’t maintain an amazing blog like yours.

By: Bacchus

Bacchus — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:27:01 +0000

Well, anon, it’s important to remember that a great many vintage erotic photographs were published fairly anonymously, because the legal and erotic risks were so great. It’s surely the case that each of these images has a copyright owner, but in most cases that owner is not discoverable, and in many cases, is probably an unknowing heir. So, as you say, claims are unlikely.

But that is, indeed, one of the reason I get grumpy when I see somebody (who is not the photographer or copyright owner) slapping their logo all over a vintage image. Use it, share it, rescue it from oblivion — I believe in all of these and consider it a great pity that our copyright laws are so badly broken with respect to such activities. But claim it by scribbling your name across it? That bothers me.

By: Anon.

Anon. — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:16:46 +0000

I wonder what kind of due diligence he’s performed on the copyrights to these photographs. I doubt that the restorations he’s performed would be considered transformative, and thus allowable under Fair Use, in a court of law, in the (extremely unlikely, I admit) event that one of the original photographers were to file a claim.