Quote:
Originally Posted by sirraffles
Is your question of royalties supposed to be your zinger? The ultimate test of what is and what is not a card? Laughable. If you collect early photographic cards then you already know that virtually every one of the cards in your early collection did not pay royalties. Will you now get rid of them? We'll have to consider them illegitimate and I'm sure that you'd like to be consistent in your philosophy. Sadly they are fading into nothingness anyway. I wonder what a blank Cinderella card will sell for? In my case the families of the players are among the best customers that I have. Literally hundreds of family members have Helmar cards and consider them heirlooms. Regarding Lajoie: the fact also remains that he was retired, probably not paid, and was a "Cinderella" card as per your own tortured logic. It will come as a disappointment to many that it, along with thousands of others from the early days until the present, are not real cards. Your fear of new people buying Helmar cards and somehow being swindled is silly at best. Our cards often sell for more than vintage anyway. You make a decisive error if you are conflating our cards with reprints. I agree that reprints are a danger. Better that we all just look at nice pictures in books. Charles Mandel.
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What is your evidence? We know as early as 1909 that ATC was signing players to contracts and paying them for images. Honus Wagner famously refused to sign a contract resulting in his card being pulled from production. Many sets from this era are missing the biggest names in the game (no t207 Ty Cobb, no t204 Christy Mathewson, etc.). If there was no need to pay players for their images, then why weren't they included in every set? Goudeys, Delongs, Diamond Stars and Play Balls all carry copyrights. Again, why wasn't Babe Ruth (and the other big stars) included in every set if you didn't need to pay to use his image? We know that the 1949 Leaf set signed players to individual contracts, resulting in confusion over the year the cards were released. We know that in the 50s, Topps and Bowman fought to sign players in their sets. So, at least since 1909, it has been a standard that card companies get the rights to players images when issuing cards.
In the 1980s, a photographer named Broder issued a set of unlicensed cards resulting in a wave of other unlicensed cards. This resulted in a lot of controversy and resulted in many card show promoters banning the sale of these cards by dealers setting up at their shows. So, for ~30 years the hobby has recognized the issues with unlicensed cards. So again, what is your evidence that "virtually every card in your collection" is unlicensed?