Let's set things straight Message #6 Posted by John Smith on 12 Mar 2003, 5:05 a.m., in response to message #5 by Mike
I think this problem of uncredited and/or misleading usage
of David (or anyone else's) pics needs some rational thinking, i.e:
- First of all, not everyone including one of David's pictures on his/her auction is necessarily trying to mislead the potential bidders or intentionally infringing David's copyright.
Many people simply don't know a thing about the HP calculators they're selling, because they got them from some relative, as part of a state, or something like that, they don't need them, and they simply want to get rid of them. Frequently, they don't have a digital camera suitable for objects of that size, nor any other easy means of getting an image, and they simply search the web for some pictures.
Frequently, they find some on the newsgroups, where people
post them all the time, and they might easily turn out to be some David's pictures.
I know this scenario does happen in real life, because as a collector, I've found such persons more than once. I particularly remember a gentleman selling an HP-16C. He had a zero feedback, and the pic was taken straight from David's site. At first I was suspicious, but a few rounds of questions/answers convinced me that he was absolutely honest and simply didn't have any means of taking an adequate picture of his item. I won the auction and guess what, his HP-16C was as new or newer than the one featured in David's pic, so the image wasn't misleading after all !!
So, in short, acting agressively against such people by default isn't
justified. They might be acting in good faith, and they might not know at all that the image belongs to David. So I would suggest informing them politely, it's just a question of good manners, and we're all rational, educated people, aren't we ?
- Secondly, no matter how many people you inform about David's pictures, there's bound to always be others doing the same, all the time, constantly. Don't you think it's a tremendous amount of everybody's valuable time wasted to be always acting like that ? What's worse, the situation won't improve ever, it's an "infinite task". No matter how many people you contact today, they will be more tomorrow, and the day after, etc. You won't be making any progress at all.
What's needed is not complaining after the fact, but preventing the fact from ever happening. And it's pretty clear how to do it: simply include some non-obstrusive text inserted into the picture, that reads something like "(c) David Hicks, MoHP - NOT FOR SALE".
Put the text in a soft, transparent grey, over some part of the calculator where it doesn't cover any important features
(between the display and the first row of keys, for instance, or between two key rows) and that's it !! It won't spoil the picture to any important degree, but no eBay seller will consider using such labeled image in his/her auction !! And they won't ever attempt to remove the text, because being in the middle of the image, and being transparent, it would be too much work, and would leave a noticeable "scar" which would detract a lot from the item's cosmetic looks.
That's it. I've proceeded like that with the pictures I took of my own collection, and they both look great and are unusable for selling purposes.
I would suggest David would do likewise. That way, he would avoid losing vast amounts of time with this problem, every concerned visitor would equally be relieved from doing likewise, and no further alert posts to the Forum would ever be necessary.
My 41 cents.
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