She used to sell prints of her father's images - and he had to have shot 5,000 players in nearly all their different uniforms and missed very few of them between 1929 and 1992 - for $10 a pop. Each bit of correspondence and every cranny of her website was filled with copyright warnings and each print had the largest copyright/DO NOT DUPLICATE stamp on it that I've ever seen.
Here's Brace's obit:
George Brace, 89 - tribunedigital-chicagotribune He had started as an apprentice to the great George Burke, one of the top five early baseball photographers. If you see a picture of a visiting player in Chicago from the 20th Century the likelihood it's a Burke or a Brace has got to be 70%_80%.
At some point in the last decade, Mary Brace made a deal with Argenta Images which started to digitize the hundreds of thousands of images and sell them at the same price - $10 per. It must've been 2014 when she sued Argenta for non-payment under their licensing agreement. She got money out of the deal but the end result was: no more Argenta website, no more Brace website. To my knowledge the images are not being distributed at the moment - which is a shame because to use our parlance here, she owns a sea full of White Whales and a Unicorn Ranch. Matt Keough in all his one-week cameos? Several color poses each. Marlan Coughtry with the Red Sox? Mickey Scott and ex-Brewers GM Doug Melvin as Yankee batting practice pitchers? Sure - regular uni or pre-game pullovers? The bat boys of the '30s, '40s, '50s? All of them including the one who grew up to be a famous Chicago TV news anchor.
You can argue the merits of the copyright laws all you want. I've looked at some of the obscure players I happened to photograph 35 years ago and thought "why should I just give these away?" and then thought "as opposed to hiding them and making exactly ten dollars off them if I auctioned the negatives off on eBay when other collectors and gamers and fans would find uses for them as I do?" More over, if I post a Randy McGilberry here or one of these new images I obtained in 'the' collection and it is used by somebody commercially the likeliest means is to pay the player to autograph them - which means that I am in essence finally paying the guy who took the time to pose for me in the first place! Win/win/win.
However, this is not the Mary Brace approach. I know of some media sites that have received demands to take down a posted Brace shot (one that was usually incorrectly claimed as theirs by one of the big photo archive companies). We've discussed Topps and their dichotomy on this (they sell the negatives only as collectibles and insist they maintain reproduction rights for the images, yet they happily post every one of them with a watermark that with a little skill you can work around, and they only get legally pissy if you post the de-watermarked images, or if you combine their images with their various card designs).
But Mary has sued - not, to my knowledge anyway, over posting a black and white version of a color shot of the answer to a trivia question from the 1960 Red Sox - but she's sued over her Dad's photography. And won.
So the long version of my cryptic "take care" is...will anybody come after us with pitchforks and subpoenas if the Coughtry shot winds up here? Not likely. But whatever the chances are, they increase if we post them without attribution or acknowledgment, or if somebody now takes the Coughtry from that post and makes a facsimile card from it or gets him to sign it and then tries to sell either, or post them elsewhere.
(Apart from the fact that one of the handful rules of here is to cite the source of anything you post).