Hi Guys,
I'm new here (you'll find me in the introduce yourself board), and wanted to join the discussions. I would love to share my collection which I am documenting on a website which is currently private. However, as the images on there are hosted online and contain much card artwork I am concerned about sharing the site due to copyright infringements. At the minute the site is more of a personal library so I am not concerned, but if I start sharing the link online am I likely to get into trouble for scanning / uploading the card images?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Tom
While somewhere in world there probably is someone in a card maker's Legal Department who is chomping at the bit for the chance to restrict the use of such imagery without license, I think that cooler heads have prevailed - I've never heard of anyone getting a cease-and-desist letter from posting photos of their own collections. We've certainly never received one here.
I'm assuming that the reasons why this hasn't happened have to do with:
1) the fact that no one is charging any fee or earning any profit from the photos, per se, except perhaps the retailers selling the decks
2) Card manufacturers and designers
very much like the fact that retailers make money from our images, because somewhere at some point in the timeline between idea and finished product on sale, their company
makes money, money that they very much want to see continue flowing to them and growing.
Or, more simply put, we are, in effect, giving the deck creators who made the decks free advertising by creating topics, adding photos and posting incessantly about upcoming and recent releases. In many cases, the custom deck makers themselves (the people who hold the copyrights to the decks they create) are the ones posting the photos in an effort to promote their products!
In other words, don't sweat it. This topic - nay, this entire forum - wouldn't exist at all if the 800-pound card-making gorilla in the room (USPC) wasn't happy about it. They would only need to unleash the hounds and drench the forum in legal documents - even if we're in the right, we're also not likely to have the resources to fight them off. But they are happy, because we buy lots of cards and they prosper in part due to the existence of places like this online. As for the smaller companies, they're tickled pink that we help them to reduce their advertising budget simply by being here.
