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Re: Breach of copyright! - photographs
I see that general discussion is focused on the question what if somebody claims the copyright for a published photo. From my experience, I have been able to see countless cases where diffierent veterans or their families, or collectors, possesed similar photos, even in cases where these people had no bound at all (like serving in same unit or at same time). I have also seen numerous cases where same photos could be found in different archives, museums or private persons. I personally have quite a lot of photos which other people also have, indeed I've even seen some of them at ebay. Still, I do not think that this is a real problem when we talk about the "Breach of copyright".
What is really disturbing is the fact that many photos are simply scanned from published books/articles and then re-published in other books/articles. Of course, these are easily recognized by apple-sized pixels, and bad retouche. In the past such practice was thought to be reserved for Eastern European publishers aqnd authors but I see very often that it has deep roots in the west as well. The last example is a book published by Motorbuchverlag about Bf 109 in foreign service and I was stunned by the amount of badly retouched scans in it.
The greatest nonsense of such practice is (in my opinion and from my experience) that in era of internet and forums like this one such behavour is absolutely unnecessary. In most cases I was able to find certain authors and historians and when I asked for help and photos I got positive reply almost every time, people were generally very keen to help. No one ever asked for money, for a contract about the copyrights or anything similar.
So what is the problem then? Why should someone publish a bad reproduction of a published photo and proudly write that it comes from his collection (the other way-around they take is to state they got it from late Heinz Nowarra or somebody else who passed away!) when they can try to get in touch with people which have the originals. Vanity, avarice or simple idleness?
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