I have generally turned the other cheek when Merkle has kicked the crap out of me over the last year or two due to mistakes I made misreading where the proverbial line has been drawn about what to show and not to show. I have served my time and have apologized to the board.
I was pretty much told not to engage in any back and forth with him, right or wrong, but this time, I cannot let it pass. Merkle's last assault is not right. I was answering a specific query about a photo and he is upset that I did not reference his ownership of a Brace photo. I did not get it from his posting, but from a custom that okcochise sent out in a download some time ago. Since it was a Topps custom, I thought it would be prudent to cut the logo off, and since that was his contribution, I did deliberately not mention him and regret having to do so now.
As to rules about the Brace photos, the days of "litigiousness" is pretty much old news. Something I wrote and posted on page 1552 (with tnfoto's advance knowledge and consent), I tracked the current status of the official Brace collection and how it is be broken up and in many cases already returned to each major league team:
LINK TO ARTICLE
Jeffrey Kelch, whose group bought the Brace collection, had no concerns about posting individual images of it. For years, many of the photos were copied and sold by the Brace family, but they cashed in handsomely and have no claim rights any longer. I'm supposed to assume that anyone has an original image of a marginal player exclusive from the 250,000 images that were still together. All of them had been digitally copied by their previous owner (Rogers, the failed Arkansas empire), which meant that anything Rogers sold was still archived in the collection that was auctioned by the Rogers executor. Kelch also made it clear that, moving forward, no individual Brave images would be sold to individual collectors by he or his group.
The sales of the Brace images is an ongoing process. At the time I wrote it, Kelch (a lifetime Cubs fan) said the Cubs were among the "six or seven" teams that had acquired the images exclusive to them. Kelch also said, His company, Digital Empire, would also be seeking out similar collections with the likewise intent of returning them to the teams "in order to allow them to protect their own history." Each team would have total and exclusive rights to produce and distribute the images as they saw fit.
Kelch also said this:
“We haven’t even talked about what we’d do if a team does not want its images. ... There’s always the Hall of Fame.”
Told why I was asking questions, Kelch appreciated that someone was interested in his efforts to see the collection preserved. No threats.