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Date: Thu, 08 Jan 1998 11:39:13 -0500
From: Laura Lindgren <Lindgren@interport.net> MIME-Version: 1.0
To: scrypt@interport.net
Subject: Mutter photos
Your inclusion of images from the Mutter Museum calendars in your website
is a violation of the copyright that is clearly posted on the calendars,
and this is to notify you that you must remove them from your website. A
search for "The Swedish Picture Archive," which you claim as your
source, does not seem to turn up any such agency, which in any case has
no permission to use these copyrighted photographs. Please remove the images
from your website immediately.
Laura Lindgren
Art Director, The Mutter Museum Calendars
Gretchen Worden Director, The Mutter Museum
February 14, 1998
Laura:
>Your inclusion of images from the Mutter Museum
calendars in your
>website is a violation of the copyright that is clearly posted on the
>calendars, and this is to notify you that you must remove them from your
website.
No copyrights were posted in The Swedish Picture
Archive, where I found the images in the first place. Please understand this
fully: No money is being made, thus no mercenary strategies were attempted.
Since the Mutter Museum is credited on the Grotesque Beauty Page, and since
no authorship is insinuated, no plagiarizing or bastardizing occurred. And since
I currently nurse no acreage of long green from which to brew lucrative teapot
litigation, all urgent ire regarding copyright infringement is impractical and
irrelevant.
>I am dismayed to see such a lack of respect
for the work of fellow artists, and for the Mutter Museum.
Where exactly have you found evidence of disrespect?
From what I've seen, your own correspondence serves up an indigestible helping
of disrespect to everyone you address. Has some unfortunate accident left you
without the ability to perceive respect? Is your otherwise mystifying loss of
respect-perception neurological in nature? Did the parasitic diffusion disk
commonly used by photographers to lend a romantic aspect to grainy photos--a
device that has always eaten away at the detail of the Mutter photographs, its
romantic tropism downplaying what is surely an aesthetic pathology that has
since mutated into the Photoshop Blur Tool™ and now threatens to infect
all mainstream imagery, until mankind's sense of aesthetics dissolves into one
vast greyscale smudge--somehow engender a blurrier sense of the context and
proportion of the behavior of others around you? Surely that would explain
the bristling indignation you muster during websearches for the word Mutter.
Some form of emotional myopia, some pathology, would explain not only your lack
of respect toward me, but also your failure to recognize respect offered to
the Mutter Museum Calendar via the Grotesque Beauty Page.
>Does Rob Hardin perhaps hope that visitors
to his website will think that he himself is the
>author of these images? I would hope that this is not his motive for including
the images on his
>website.
What an extraordinary accusation for you to have made. If I hadn't given the
Mutter Museum full credit, your websearch would never have located my site in
the first place. Furthermore, if you'd examined the Grotesque Beauty site at
all, you might have realized that the entire point of the site is to
give full credit--not only to the artists, but also to the archives in which
their work appears. No one is going to sue over copyright infringement of Piranesi's
images, yet they are credited here in order to publicize art and effort that
deserves ever greater acclaim. No one need credit the archive of the images
to avoid litigation, but I have done so in order to acknowledge the archiver's
contribution to public knowledge of indispensible art.
Incidentally: How could I have been trying to feign "authorship" of
images I'd credited as issuing from someone else's archive? Could this lacuna
of logic be connected to your earlier respect perception problem? Could
some global logical error, some bad trap implementation of the Id, have passed
directly from your computer to your litigation folder? You sentence good read
this re syntax can spect garding ness polite re reading mis out with?
The Mutter Museum Calendar was beautiful, but even
so: It is silly to accost people who show appreciation for your work and who
credit the source. It is tedious and ill-advised to lambaste strangers with
ad hominem insinuations of slimy motives. Such accusations say far more about
you than those you accuse. I'm not being dismissive when I say your true enemies
are elsewhere (Id Trap Implementation Error #2047-M).
Whom do you imagine responds favorably to invective? Why risk disillusioning
fans who might have considered the Mutter Museum Calendar a cause well worth
supporting? Low-res scans of photographs will never replace high-res reproductions.
It's a difference of 140K versus 40 megs of visual data lost. Low-res scans
are meant as a tease for decent reproductions: Their function is to advertise
what websurfers might not have otherwise discovered.
Consider the context of your condescending remarks. You don't know me; moreover,
in the past, I have always supported your work. Moreover, I am a writer whose
last book won the Firecracker Award for Best Fiction in 1997 and made the critic's
top ten list on the Amazon website. I have been published by Oxford University
Press, the Mississippi Review and other such places. Nevermind that you're addressing
me as if I were an indolent manservant who had been caught loading your espresso
machine into his fast-filch larceny hut. My authority doesn't matter. What matters
is that you've placed undue emphasis on your own authority.
My books are published just as your calendars are published. Fans and friends
upload excerpts just as I uploaded Mutter images. Occasionally, it has happened
that some individual uploaded certain of my published, copyrighted stories without
asking for permission. (Keep in mind that stories, unlike photographs, can be
uploaded with no loss of resolution.) On those occasions, I have either ignored
the infringement, or politely and sympathetically asked that well-meaning individual
to remove the story. On the Internet, as elsewhere, it is important to maintain
a friendly tone.
Prior to this, I had always supported the Mutter Museum artwork. It was in the
spirit of preserving the memory and beauty of your calendar that I uploaded
the scans I'd downloaded from the Swedish Picture Archive.
>And this is to notify you that you must remove them
from your website.
Do you truly feel I might be exhibiting these pictures for personal profit?
Do you see any credit card cgi script on this site? What is the reason for your
uncivil tone and slew of uncharitable assumptions? Is it time to renew your
politeness lens prescription? My only motivation for exhibiting Mutter photos
was to make more potential fans aware of their existence.
>A search for "The Swedish Picture Archive,"
which you claim as your
>source, does not seem to turn up any such agency, which in any case has
>no permission to use these copyrighted photographs.
This is perhaps the most irritating thing you've
insinuated in a rondo of irritating insinuations. You assume I've "claimed"
The Swedish Picture Archive as my source--no doubt out of the congenital dishonesty
you've repeatedly implied I posses. But how did you come by such theories as
to my motives? And why do you speak as if you had personal information regarding
my motives and mindset--personal information about me, an absolute and apparently
blurry stranger?
FYI, here is the exact path to the original source as given by Anarchie (and
by the way: I didn't cite it incorrectly; Anarchie's most recently uploaded
bookmarks file still links to one of Peter Lewis's mirror sites, where a mirrored
subfolder is still named The Swedish Picture Archive):
Server: archie.luth.se
Path: ftp://ftp.sunet.se//pub/pictures/collections/calendars/Mutter_Museum_of_Pathology_1993/
>Please remove the images from your website
immediately.
If you'd asked in a civil tone, I'd have taken
down the pictures right away. But since you chose to insult and threaten me,
I took the photographs down at my leisure. Since you seem not to endorse or
even to notice courtesy, why should I have rushed when the effort would simply
have seemed to you to be another disrespectful blur? Absorbing the nasty tone
of your letter had already cost me time enough. How disheartening, that a gifted
person like yourself, who created the calendar I had always praised and defended,
should turn out to be so reflexively acerbic. If you continue to order people
to take down your images "immediately" and to assassinate their characters,
someone somewhere might actually invite you to sue them. And unless
your respect perception improves, you'll never know why.
My sincere good wishes,
Rob Hardin
Further Correspondence From Laura Lindgren
To Enno Vandermeer:
1/13/98
Subject: infringement of copyright
One of the pages in your website incorporates three images from the Mutter Museum calendar and is in violation of copyright. The page is Rob Hardin's "Grotesque Beauty." I sent an e-mail to Rob Hardin last Thursday, 1/8/98, requesting that he remove the images, but I have heard no response from him. In his page, Hardin credits the Swedish Picture Archive as the source of these images. I located the Swedish University Network (Hardin has the source name wrong) last Thursday and informed them that they were in violation of copyright by reproducing the images in their website. They removed the images within one hour, with apologies for the unwitting violation. I suspect that Hardin similarly does not realize that these are copyrighted images. However, they are most definitely copyrighted; they were scanned from the Mutter Museum Calendar, where copyright notice is clearly stated. I must request that you remove the images from your website immediately, as no permission to reproduce them has been sought by you or Hardin, nor has a NY such permission been granted.
1/19/98
Subject: infringement of copyright still not rectified
I've just checked Rob Hardin's site again and am displeased to see that he still has not removed the copyrighted Mutter Museum images from it, nor have I received any response from him. Will you please let me know what steps you will take to remove them from his site. This is a serious problem, and I would hope that it can be taken care of without resorting to any legal action.
1/28/98
Subject: infringement of copyright continues
It's been a week since I sent you a note to let you know that Rob Hardin has not removed the copyrighted Mutter Museum images from his website that is hosted by your server, which you promised to take steps to remove yourself. I am surprised to see that Hardin's website still contains the copyrighted images and that there has been no response to my e-mail of a week ago. I find it very odd that Hardin would not have removed the images the moment that he was notified that he is infringement of copyright. The Swedish University Archive, from which he obtained the images, removed the images from their site within one hour of notification that they were in infringement of copyright. These photographs were created by four photographers specifically for the Mutter Museum, and it is disrespectful, to say the least, to these artists for Rob Hardin to reproduce their photographs with no permission from them or the Mutter Museum, not to mention with no identification of the artists who made the photographs. Does Rob Hardin perhaps hope that visitors to his website will think that he himself is the author of these images? I would hope that this is not his motive for including the images on his website. Further, I would appeal to both him and to you to be respectful of the fact that these images depict medical material, and to display them with no information whatsoever is to mystify the viewer, if not to mislead him outright. I expect to hear from you soon with regard to this matter; if the images have not been removed by Friday, I will have no recourse but to request legal action from the attorneys for the photographers, who are quite distressed to find their images appropriated. I am dismayed to see such a lack of respect for the work of fellow artists, and for the Mutter Museum.
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