DB Annex

metafilter:

You guys are linking to this guy:
http://shorpy.com/
http://www.metafilter.com/59584/The-100-Year-Old-Photoblog
He's selling public domain images he's mining out of the Library of Congress digital archives.
But he's not acknowledging that.
He's not giving credit to the people who are doing the research and archiving work that he's exploiting.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/195_copr.html#question4
It looks like he's doing lots of field work and compilation, but it's the staff at LoC who are doing it, as is obvious to anyone who's browsed their digital archives. I wouldn't mind if he was throwing images that he'd found there, if he was attributing them. but he isn't, and it's a scammy sleazy thing to do. Plus there's those restrictions at the Prints and Photographs Division site that he's violating, and if they get on to it they might shut off access to the rest of us, who aren't co-opting the free imagery there for mercantile purposes.
I'd have left this comment at the page itself but the headache of paying to do that is an obstacle.

cheers and thanks for your attention

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email exchange with Joerg Colberg:

Hi Michael,

I honestly don't know what you're talking about. [not the first time I've heard that, is it]
Unless you're more specific with regards to "shorpy" (whatever that is) I can't help you.

Best,
Joerg
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Joerg-
herewith are some I hope clearer and more precise links to what this is about:

Shorpy, "a beautiful photo blog of life for the past 100 years."
http://www.shorpy.com/node/81
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/nclc.01128
that's the first image that caused me to check.

Here's the current front end
http://www.shorpy.com/node?page=8
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsac.1a34274

Here's the kottke.org linkage
http://tinyurl.com/2ljryu

and it's on metafilter:
http://www.metafilter.com/59584/The-100-Year-Old-Photoblog

This is my personal response to it:
http://dirtybeloved.blogspot.com/2007/03/if-only-id-thought-of-it-first-letter.html
Unfortunately I don't have the readership to do much about it.
And metafilter wants money to comment there.

It's got a technorati listing, for what that's worth.
http://technorati.com/search/shorpy

I'm not whining about his throwing the images up, and of course people
like them - it's the complete lack of attribution, and the
merchandising of public domain stuff without the acknowledgment.
As though he's researching anything. He's just browsing the parent
directories at LoC.
Strip mining the public domain.

Browsing the directories there is what I do, as well. But I'm pretty
careful to throw the links back to the people who have done the real
work of making the imagery available.
And as I said what I'm afraid of is that because of his mercenary
stupidity the LoC will be pissed off enough to close down access to
the deeper parts of their wonderful archives.
I'd sure appreciate some help. I don't want to snitch him off to them,
I'd prefer it be settled on the net by the communities involved. And I
don't need any recognition personally.
This is sleaze working against art, and it should be stopped.

cheers
msg

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> I'm not whining about his throwing the images up, and of course people
> like them - it's the complete lack of attribution, and the
> merchandising of public domain stuff without the acknowledgment.

I must be missing something, but this is what the public domain is
about. You can record a public domain song and sell a CD that contains
the song. Same thing.

> This is sleaze working against art, and it should be stopped.

I disagree.

Best,
Joerg
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If Alan Lomax or somebody had gone into the Georgia backwoods and recorded some old mountaineer with a five string banjo and a bunch of songs nobody'd ever heard before and you, taking advantage of the fact that nobody'd ever heard of Alan Lomax either, recorded those songs exactly, or as exactly as your talent allowed, and in the same order as they appeared on the field recording, without ever acknowledging Lomax's primary contribution - that would be sleazy. Not the passing it on, not the singing and playing, but the bypassing of the hard work of that crucial and necessary intermediary.
It's like your plagiarism riffs - of course people are going to see that bridge and those lights and those buildings in much the same way, and if some master hits the light just right the up-and-coming will want to get there too or near it as well. When you find two images that are similar you naturally wonder which came first, if there's any connection, and key point - if there's any conscious co-opting going on.
And the debate is more than at least a little to do with *conscious* appropriation isn't it?
The public domain is vulnerable to exploitation because it's public, and therefore free.
It's precisely that quality of the p.d. that I'm trying to defend, its free-ness.
I'm not bothered by his using the images, posting them, creating a web site devoted entirely to them, I use a lot of them in precisely that way, and in fact some of this is probably about my own inclination toward doing a pretty much all-LoC all the time site in the near future.
But I would never associate it with merchandising no matter how broke I got, not in the way he's done.
This guy's scamming people, vaguely and obscurely, but it's scamming nonetheless.
Also there's this:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/195_copr.html#question4
The difference between
Hey! look at this that these guys made available to me and to all of us
and
Hey!, look what I found! Now, if you want more you'll have to go through me to get it.
Also since I put that comment up at kottke, the guy's altered his site so that the two images I pointed to as lifted directly - which all the images I checked are, not some - all of them, right out of the praent directories at LoC - those images I linked to are now buried int he archives.
Not exactly a champion of the free use of the public domain.

Maybe it's a small matter, my heart says no, but I have a lot of respect for your aesthetic ethic so am listening...

cheers