Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Judy Bolton and Penny Parker Reprints

Someone recently asked about the Judy Bolton and Penny Parker reprints that are up for sale on Amazon.

The Judy Bolton reprints were published by Applewood and have high quality paper. They are softcover books and are very nice.  The cover art is a high quality reproduction of the original Grosset and Dunlap cover art.

I do not know what the quality of the Penny Parker books is. If you go to the Project Gutenberg website, you can download the texts of all of those books for free. Unless you prefer holding a book in your hand, you would be better off getting the texts from Project Gutenberg.

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/w#a37000

The books cannot be found on Gutenberg by searching for Penny Parker.  Instead, the books can be found by searching for Mildred Wirt.

The publisher of the Penny Parker books got the texts by downloading them for free from Project Gutenberg. They also took the scans from Project Gutenberg and used as the cover art.

The person who placed the Penny Parker texts on Gutenberg swiped the scans of the dust jackets from my website without my permission. I don't own the rights to the images, but it was very rude. He asked for permission and was denied, but he did it anyway.

The Mildred Wirt texts were first mentioned in the comments to this post.  I am pretty good at reading intentions in certain situations.  First, the guy stated that I might be interested in the Ruth Fielding and Betty Gordon books that are up at Project Gutenberg.  He then stated that Penny Nichols and Penny Parker would be up soon.  I thought that the comments seemed odd, and I wondered where this was leading.  I knew that something was coming.

My suspicions were confirmed when the guy surfaced again in the comments to this post.  He requested permission to upload my scans to Project Gutenberg.  I denied permission, because I knew that once the scans were on Project Gutenberg, people would be using the scans as the covers of books that would be up for sale.  I knew that the books would soon be up for sale by somebody. 

On January 2, 2011, Jennifer Fisher informed me that my scans were on Amazon on the Penny Parker books.  I checked, and sure enough, they were on Amazon and that was when I discovered that my scans had been placed on Project Gutenberg.  Once scans get copied, they get copied everywhere and with no credit given.

Why did the guy want the scans on Project Gutenberg?  After all, anyone who reads Penny Parker can get the scans from my website.  Could it be that he was intending to profit from the books?

By the way, aside from Project Gutenberg, I am fine with some use of my scans so long as the original source, my website, is mentioned alongside the scan.  Jenn Fisher has used some of my scans in her blog, and she has credited the source.  I am totally fine with that.

What I am not fine with is all of the people who have copied my scans onto their websites and blogs without giving me credit.  Some of these people read this blog and have used my scans.  It is very disrespectful to "borrow" someone's scans when that person went to a large amount of trouble to edit those scans to make them perfect and then just to copy them somewhere else with no credit given.

Of all of the images on my website, the Penny Parker dust jackets are the ones which took by far the longest to make look nice.  I may have spent a couple of hours on each dust jacket.  As anyone who collects Penny Parker knows, it is extremely difficult to acquire decent dust jackets, and even so, the jackets tend to be quite soiled and grubby.  It figures that the images that took the longest are the ones that are getting used so that other people can profit from them.

I don't own the rights to the images, and there is nothing legally wrong with people using them.  I want to make it clear that I know that I have no rights to the images and no legal recourse.  My problem is just the amount of time I spent on them, and my time is devalued when people take the images and copy them everywhere and give no credit as to whom created the edited images.

This is why that for any future sections of my website, I will not edit out the flaws in the dust jackets.  Any scans I do in the future will go up as is, which interestingly enough, will make it less likely that others will copy them.  After all, specific flaws make it obvious when two scans are from the same source.

Last, this is not something that I waste a lot of energy on.  I may get a little annoyed, but I have bigger battles to fight.

2 comments:

stratomiker said...

People may not know that they are particularly YOUR images because Google picks them up and lists them in the images search. Many people search for images to use, find them on Google, and never have any idea who put them online in the first place. So it's not always a personal thing. Blame it on Google. Who said they can take your images and display them?

Anything you put online can end up all over the place. For years I had several original character ebooks and some collectible character fanfiction ebooks online. They were picked up by websites all over the world and are still online everywhere, even though my sites were shut down by the server when they stopped FTP space.

I think it's just the nature of the Internet that as long as you can copy something, it will be done. Google is doing it on youtube and it's up to the copyright owner to complain and put a stop to it. I have a program that copies only the audio from youtube music videos so you can have the song as an mp3. So you can get the song from youtube and not even pay for it, and the program is a free download.

Those who know about bittorrent can download anything. My nephew just got me the whole Boston Legal seasons and last year's GLEE.

Even MAGIC TALISMAN, that $4,000 (on eBay) Rick Brant book is free by bitorrent. This stuff is said to be not legal - but who's watching?

The inevitable outcome of all this is that so called 'intellectual property' rights are going to be changing and fluxing in the years to come as the Internet forces change by its unstoppable nature.

Mike

Lauren said...

I thought this comment he made to you after you denied permission to the scans:

"And always, thanks for all the research--we get the benefit of it."

was rather obnoxious.