Point – Counterpoint

Something very different for you today in that I put myself on the line. In order to avoid any lead in to your thoughts,  I will post this exchange unedited and you are free to offer your opinion regardless of which side of the fence that you sit on. Seriously,  if your thoughts are the same as SpankBoss’ then please feel free to say so,  I have no problem with that.

SpankBoss and I have had a discussion this week and he stated that he has no problem with me posting this exchange on my site,  and likewise I do not have an issue with it as well. It would be nice to hear the feedback of the readers though regardless of where you stand.

On Thursday SpankBoss made THIS POST in which he took an edited copy of one of my sorority pics and refused to acknowledge via a link that I had contributed the picture to the community because I had put my name on the pic. SpankBoss didn’t actually say that he was the one who edited it so I’m not sure if he got it from my site or if another website had done the editing. Now his post made Chross’ Spankings Of The Week this week,  when I posted it back in Sept of LAST YEAR it did not make spankings of the week. Chross has had my version of the copy in his Newspaper Articles folder since October of last year so while I didn’t get a direct link back,  the pic was added unedited so therefore his viewers were still able to see that I had made the contribution.

So here is the deal. SpankBoss’ point is that I do not own the pics so therefore I have no right to deface them and he will not provide a link to my contributions as he considers it ethically wrong. He may not be the only one who thinks this way as I receive little to no links back in this area.

My counterpoint is that I have invested an incredible amount of time on this project,  as well as personal finance which is close to $400 at this point,  that I feel that there should be some respect in the community when my contributions are taken. It simply isn’t given. My hard work has become a source of pictures being taken freely and the acknowledgements that I receive in return are next to nothing. As this happens regardless of whether I put my name on one of my finds or not,  I go back and forth between putting my name on them to give myself the credit as the source before they are taken and edited.

So that is where we started our discussion and it is posted here in its entirety,  unedited. Your opinions,  whether for or against are most welcome. For the record,  in my sorority folder,  12 pics bear my name and 32 do not.  My Men Are Like Streetcars pics,  which according to my data I have never received a link back to any single pic that was taken,  9 pics bear my name and 15 do not.

I want to stress very clearly,  if your thoughts echo SpankBoss’,  then I want you to feel free to share them. I’m not offended in the least by his opinion nor will I be by yours. We have differing thoughts on the subject,  as I no doubt others will have as well. Here is our exchange starting with SpankBoss’ original comment,  and as I said,  I have his permission to post this here. You are also welcome to add your comments,  SpankBoss 🙂

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By SpankBoss — It seems that this image may have been originally placed on the internet by that member of our community who is notorious for plastering his personal watermark all over spanking imagery he did not create (misbehavior that I have traditionally balked at encouraging,  either by reproducing the wrongly-watermarked image or by link credit in those cases). Fortunately,  I was able to come up with the watermark-less version you see here!

  1. Richard Windsor commented on July 11th, 2013:
    I don’t mind being called out on this issue if it is indeed me that you are speaking of. It is a double edged sword for me really,  giving a preference I would rather not put any mark on any pic and bring to the community the 100?s of unique pics that I have collected through both my time and personal finance. In an ideal world I could post unmarked pics and fellow bloggers will respectfully share the love I am sharing with them by giving my efforts a nod of appreciation,  but that doesn’t happen so I give my work my own nod. Now of course there are sites that deliberately will not give me a nod if I mark something,  but I am okay with that and I respect that choice.

    If you would like my thoughts on the topic though,  I would prefer never to add my website address to any pic,  but at the same time I would also love for my cost and time to be given some appreciation as a valuable contribution to the community. As much as I understand your dislike of people marking pics,  hopefully you would have some understanding that just the smallest amount of appreciation for my efforts would be most welcome,  but that of course is an ideal world.

    If there is any pic that you would like unedited,  just tell me which one and it is yours,  and I wouldn’t even want a link back to it. After all,  I am making this contribution to the community with kindness and a desire to bring joy to people’s eyes.

    Sincerely,

    Richard Windsor

    1. SpankBoss commented on July 11th, 2013:
      Richard,  I am sympathetic in one sense. I have contributed no few  “original”  scans to the web myself,  and I frequently do a lot of work cleaning up found spanking artwork that needs help. I know the frustration that comes of having it spread throughout the web without any credit. Since I blogged for many many years using a standardized 320-pixel image size that was unique in the spanking blog world,  it’s very easy for me to track the spread of many of “my” images without credit,  and they are ubiquitous at this point.

      Nonetheless,  in my worldview putting your name on a thing is to claim that thing. And when you have no moral claim to that thing,  it’s an ethical violation;  one that actively detracts from and degrades the utility of the thing you say you want to share. It’s just not something I can support,  no matter how much I understand the impulse that might lead a person in that direction.

      I have enormous admiration for the library of vintage images you have brought to the web,  and it is a source of abiding frustration to me that you’ve chosen to degrade so many of them contrary to all the ethics that I comprehend with regard to the use of other people’s content. It’s not about any one image,  it’s about a valuable library that’s been vandalized by the man who created it. I can’t imagine using one’s own name as graffiti,  but that’s what you seem to be doing,  to me. To my mind the considerable credit that’s due you for surfacing these images is precisely counterbalanced by your choice to deface them,  leaving nothing left in positive sum to acknowledge with a link credit. I know you won’t ever see eye-to-eye with me on this,  but it’s where I stand.

    2. Richard Windsor commented on July 11th, 2013:
      Spankboss,

      You may be surprised that we may indeed see eye to eye with certain aspects of what you say,  in fact I have debated it with myself many times. Should you visit my folders you will see as many unmarked as you would see marked. You are correct,  I have no right to claim something as my own,  even those pics that I purchased a single copy of for $20 and then shared with the community.

      I’m sure that you do see my frustration and I think the frustration is valid. There may be some pics that took me four hours to find and that I paid to get a copy of,  and I get a thrill making a new discovery,  and that is really where my frustration lies. It can take me four hours to find one pic yet it would take one person mere seconds to come and raid my archives and not even so much as give me a friendly mention. You are probably right,  I am depriving an audience of a clear image,  but then the blogs that take the material that I post and don’t mention that fact are also depriving their audience of a pretty decent collection of pics by failing to share that information with their viewers.

      It is a battle that I struggle with and I always welcome feedback,  even if it goes against what my feelings might be. I also have pretty strong ethics though I guess mine center more around treating people decently. In fact today I thought it might be a good idea to make a point/counterpoint post on my site with your opinion versus my opinion,  and done so in a way that wasn’t slanted. That of course would require your permission and it is just a thought.

      Now I am fully aware that there are people such as yourself who will refuse to give me a link back should my name appear on a pic,  and there are ten times more who won’t give me a link if my name is not on a pic,  so it is a lose/lose situation all around for me. Believe it or not I agree with you,  even if I have paid hundreds of dollars and invested more time than you can ever imagine on this project,  I should have no claim to this material. Perhaps I am misguided but the stance that I take is that if people aren’t going to acknowledge me regardless of whether my name is on a pic or not,  then I will acknowledge myself. As you will no doubt know,  rather than plaster my name all over the pics,  I always put them in a place where they can easily be edited out simply by cropping my name out,  as this pic itself shows,  my name was easily cropped out of the top left corner.

      It is an internal struggle and I quite often revert back to why I do it in the first place,  to share my collection with the community with pleasure. By revert back I mean that I will go weeks where I convince myself not to mark any pics and try and ignore the fact that I am being a supplier for other websites. I guess six to eight weeks go by and then I get grumpy and the lack of courtesy starts to bother me. In a nutshell that is what it comes down to for me,  if I got just the smallest recognition for my efforts then I wouldn’t mark anything,  but as I said I don’t get it whether I mark them or not so it is a moot point.

      Anyway,  I have taken up way too much of your time but don’t count your opinion out,  this may just convince me to ignore what I perceive to be a lack of respect and revert back to giving to the community without any qualifications at all. It IS why I do it after all,  I just have to convince myself that what I am doing doesn’t need any recognition. Yes,  I even question my own ethics and have battled the thought that I consider myself to be greedy,  as greedy as I consider others who take my efforts and present it as their own. Though I do consider myself a giving person though because if I was greedy then I wouldn’t share them at all,  and that just isn’t going to happen. What I have in my collection yet to be posted is mind blowing and needs to be shared with the community. Anyway,  thanks for your feedback,  it was appreciated,  even if it was to my own detriment 🙂

      Richard Windsor

      1. SpankBoss commented on July 12th, 2013:
        Sorry about the 2500 character limit,  it’s from the days when spam robots would post 10k word comments requiring mass scrolling in my moderation queue.

        You’re more than welcome to take anything I’ve said here and re-post it on your blog in any format you like,  as long as you don’t chop up the quotes so badly that they lose meaning (which I don’t imagine you would in any case).

        If as a consequence of these discussions you were to stop watermarking vintage pictures,  I’d be awfully glad. As I’ve said,  I’m extremely familiar with the emotional place you’re coming from,  and I’ve a ton of empathy for the impulse to mark your contributions to the community. In fact,  one reason Bethie stopped working on her Vintage Spanking Photos site (where she put an enormous amount of effort into restoring degraded vintage spanking photography with painstaking pixel-by-pixel removal of offensive watermarks and all kinds of other visual damage) is that she grew tired of seeing her painstaking restorations all over the web with no source credit. I think the final straw was when several eBay sellers started printing her restored photos on mugs and mouse pads and other such stuff and selling them online. She just didn’t have the heart to continue after that. So it’s a real problem,  no lie.

        Still,  at the end of the day,  I just don’t think that degrading these images in order to mark them is justifiable when one’s contributions (however valued and substantial) are curatorial rather than creative. Possibly one reason for the difference in our outlook is that I value linking to the best,  largest,  most true-to-the-original format of anything that I find on the web. Cropping a picture for presentation is something I do all the time,  but I usually try to include or link the closest-to-original,  least-cropped,  least-processed original as well. An image with watermarks is generally too degraded for that purpose,  as is an image that’s been cropped just to remove a watermark (sometimes removing valuable detail). Silly example:  we’re interested in spanking;  somebody else may be interested in hair styles or shoe styles or wallpaper patterns. A crop that seems  “harmless”  to us (a bit of wallpaper gone,  or somebody’s feet,  or the carved wainscotting) may seem terribly destructive to somebody with other interests. So perhaps these watermarks and resulting crops seem more like damage to me than they do to you.

8 thoughts on “Point – Counterpoint

  1. Dear Guys,
    With respect, I think this is a tempest in a teapot. Neither of you “own” the pic in any way, or have any right to prohibit others to post it or, conversely, to demand credit for “finding” it once it was posted by someone and not owned by anyone, to our knowledge. We appreciate your efforts to find these pics for our enjoyment. If someone doesn’t want a pic with a watermark,then he or she can simply not download it, or for that matter, refuse to go to the site where the watermarks are sometimes added. The rest of us will enjoy pics with or without watermarks and we all can live and let live.

    O.H.

  2. Gee. I didn´t even notice the text underneath the picture, just the reference to AllThingsSpanking. Been a little pressed for time this week…and now look what happened…

    Anyway, I usually don´t watermark my finds. Except some video clips, but just to drive off the vultures that otherwise take it to earn money with it.
    Some of my own stuff is watermarked in a very decent way.
    I can see understand both points of view.
    A middle course would be something like I`ve done here:
    http://chross.blogt.ch/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=1137
    Does not cahnge the picture itself, but still adds information.
    Of course it can be removed. Quite easily, too. But the lazy ones probably won´t bother. And the other ones will find ways to remove any watermark anyway.

    Chross

  3. Richard: Since I am undercover,but you now know my I.P. address,I will not choose this moment to go public-so consider this between you and me. I think that the whole question can be solved with one word-Motivation. If you post to have your name correspond with an acknowledgment of your hard work in finding and posting then by all means-add your name in some inconspicuous location that is visible to the public. This is your site, and everyone who visits here is aware of the hard work that you must have put in as it shows your dedication to the public. If you just want to post pictures and let someone do as they want,don’t expect credit as some are very selfish people and won’t plug your blog>but if your plugging them,quit doing them any favors. I can see both sides,but you don’t have to be nice to everyone to remain a popular site, which you obviously are. Use the same kind of thinking that cops have to use-“be nice-until it is time not to be nice” and no one will fault you for that kind of reasoning.I wish you the very best of luck,but remember, this blog is yours. do with it,what you want in order to keep yourself happy.

  4. What is being said by SpankBoss is, to paraphrase, ‘you don’t own the photograph because you didn’t actually take it; you just found it’.

    The way I look at it, there are different degrees of ‘ownership’. Out there on the web, there’s a huge morass of undifferentiated material. Most of it is not immediately or easily accessible to the people who are most interested in it: it has to be actively researched and brought to a place where they can see it. This process takes time, skill and sometimes money, all of which is grievously demeaned by the view summarized as ‘you just found it’. So the real issue is what credit the researcher deserves for his work.

    I don’t see it as a matter of ethics so much as of etiquette. My viewpoint is best illustrated by a series of grouchy anecdotes…

    I once posted a completely new find to the now defunct Kiss Me Kate spanking Yahoo group called allrightmissvanessi. Literally within an hour, my find had been reposted to three other Yahoo spanking groups by someone going by the name of Hapgood Baines. I had no problem with the picture being circulated further: if it reached a few more people who would enjoy it, that was fine. But what really riled me was that Hapgood Baines was thanked and congratulated for his fantastic discovery, while I received no acknowledgement at all in the group where I originally posted it. Had he possessed an ounce of decency, Hapgood Baines would have responded to the thanks by saying that actually he only found the picture in another spanking group, and that someone else put in the effort of bringing it into the spanking community for him to find. And had the members of allrightmissvanessi possessed an ounce of decency, they would have thanked me for my contribution. After that I gave up posting finds to that particular group.

    Another time, and in another Yahoo group, I posted some very precise information about where to find another splendid spanking picture which I saw years before in a library hard copy but had no way of reproducing. The main outcome of this was that another member of the group, a person not unknown to the online spanking community, replied that I must be mistaken and that what I had really seen was an extremely wellknown spanking picture. I found this very insulting. Some months later, somebody else actually checked out the information and the excellent picture was found and posted. Celebrations all round. But I never received an apology or even an admission that I had been right all along. That was another Yahoo group that stopped getting contributions from me.

    Very recently, and in a place not far from here, I posted a little piece of information, which was quickly seen and acted upon by a wellknown spanking blogger: he found the material in question online and posted a link on his own blog, making no mention of where the information came from so that it effectively appeared to be his own find. It wasn’t a major discovery and also this person did me a favor or two in the past, so I’m inclined to forgive his minor lapse of etiquette (which, so far as I know, is out of character for him). But my point is that it *was* a lapse: you mustn’t treat researchers like that.

    To repeat: I don’t own the material because I didn’t create it. But I feel that I *do* own the initial find (or part-own it, if I was only the supplier of the information that led to the material itself) and I *do* expect that to be appropriately acknowledged.

    But what’s appropriate will vary from researcher to researcher. I like to think we’re mostly very community spirited people who don’t ask much beyond due respect – something which, you’ll gather, I don’t believe I have always received for the various contributions I have made to the community. I have specifically asked Richard *not* to put my name on any photos I may contribute here, partly because I don’t want to be responsible for a photo dropping a jpeg generation just to get myself credit which I know Richard will give me anyway when he presents the picture. (What happens to it after that is beyond anyone’s control.) But one thing that obviously matters a lot to Richard in particular is that he gets visitors coming to his blog, and adding the web address to the new finds he presents is one way of trying to achieve that objective. Is that really so unreasonable a price to pay for a steady supply of excellent mainstream spanking material that we have never seen before? Or putting it another way, would you rather Richard did what I did with those graceless, thankless Yahoo groups, and stopped bothering?

  5. I feel you own it if you put in the time and effort, which you are amazing at doing…..tough one sir.
    Ron

  6. I really hesitate to weigh in on this because I’ve taken and reposted images from both Richard and Spankboss (with appropriate credit, I hope!), and I certainly can’t afford to lose any of the few friends I have! But I’ll say just a few words, if I may.

    First, I really take exception to O.H.’s comment that “neither of you… have any right…to demand credit for ‘finding’ it once it was posted by someone and not owned by anyone”. Translated into simple English, he’s saying that you have no right to expect credit for finding something just because you found it! These items aren’t just posted by “someone” in the sense of “a person unknown”, they are found and posted by particular persons whose identities are very much known, be it Spankboss, Richard, Harry, or myself, to take four very obvious examples. It’s as if O.H. simply doesn’t wish to acknowledge that without “someone’s” efforts, there would be no image for him to look at – or appropriate for his own purposes.

    Like Richard and Harry, I feel that it is not unreasonable to expect acknowledgement for one’s efforts in finding spanking material that would otherwise almost certainly remain unknown to the spanko community. To expect this is not to assert ownership in the copyright sense, or to demand that no one repost it on pain of death! And like Spankboss, I don’t want to deface great images (mainly comics and cartoons in my case, but I’ve also had some good newspaper clippings from M.D.’s collection). So for a brief period about three years ago, I placed the tiniest watermark imaginable on some of my offerings, thus hoping to achieve a compromise solution. And like most compromises, this one failed miserably!

    First, I didn’t like seeing the watermark there (I guess that’s my inner Spankboss speaking). Second, you can’t stop people from removing it, reposting the image without it, and refusing to give you credit (as Richard knows) anyway. So in the end I gave up, although sometimes when I find “my” stuff reposted without credit I send a note or post a comment indicating that this material came from me. Such omissions can be perfectly innocent as I know from experience: I keep records of where I find things so I can give credit when I finally get around to posting them months (sometimes years) later, but those records aren’t perfect.

    Maybe I’ve been lucky – most of the time, spanking bloggers give me full credit, or so it seems. The truth is, I only have time to visit about a dozen spanking blogs per week (Spankboss’s and Richard’s obviously among them), so perhaps I’ve just been wise in my selection.

  7. I think it’s unfortunate that so many folks continually copy and paste your pics that you even have to discuss this at length time and again. I try not to use a lot of material on my own blog that I’m unable to credit due to not knowing where it came from. If I do share an image, I credit it back to where I found it or who I know is in it.

    A few times when something is from a personal blog, I email the blogger to ask if I can use it and then still credit it back. I think that is common courtesy. Obviously not all people do this. I do not think the watermark you add is obtrusive to the image. You clearly put a lot of time and effort, much less money, into the images you share and deserve to be credited back for that.

  8. You rarely post links to where you find pictures even though many of them came from the internet. Why is that? Why not credit your source directly? Just because something comes from an obscure website, group or nonspanking site (such as school yearbook sites) doesn’t mean the person that took the time to scan and post the image shouldn’t get recognition. Why is their time less deserving of credit?

    Of course you go way beyond simply not crediting your sources and leap all the way to watermarking the image as if you own it and use having spent personal time looking as an excuse for doing so. How is that ethical?

    It could be excused if your motivations really were as you present them. That you’re simply wishing to present “new” content to interested readers and merely want credit for your efforts. You’d still be wrong mind you, you don’t earn ownership of a photo merely because it took some time to find. Your frustration would be somewhat understandable though. The reality is though that you do what you do in order to make money from your different affiliate programs. You view traffic as income which is why you hide your sources and pirate the work of others.

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