Paddling The Pledges, 1965
Inspired by a grainy cropped detail of an old sorority spanking photo spotted on All Things Spanking, I went looking for a better quality photo, and found a much larger version (click for full size):
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!
See Also:
Good find. I found the cropped version that I posted long ago, and just used it yesterday. I had no idea there was a full size version. There was no attribution attached to it, and no watermark. I, too, do not care for folks who splatter their watermark on the work or others.
Mitc (All Things Spanking)
[…] (July 11, 2013): The folks at The Spanking Blog found a full-size and complete version of this photo, and posted it today. I had no idea there was a full size version. There was no attribution […]
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
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.
I think that is Miss Hathaway there on the far right wielding a paddle…
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.
Continued.
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
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.
[…] gepost op spanking blog als op All things […]
[…] Civil Disobedience Fourth at the farm Power Girl Pajama Party Ouch Spanking shrink The Guardian Paddling the pledges Celebrating The audience (Hardcastle) Just a touch up? Posted by Chross in Spankings of the Week […]
[…] 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 […]
Okay, I made my point/counterpoint post today, and in accordance with fairness I left our exchange unedited. Should you change your mind and decide that you don’t wish for it to be posted then I will gladly remove it, but as I have stated here already, I have no problem with your opinion so I feel comfortable sharing it.
Rich
Thanks Richard. I’m cool with it as you’ve done it, no worries.
We have purchased no small amount of original art, but we don’t watermark it. And this is not pictures we have “collected” on the Internet; we own the art. The money we paid is for its use, but we want full credit to go to the author. Probably the best example is my personal favorite of all time, Sassy Bottoms’ A Missus in Distress. Here it is on crankyspanker.
http://crankyspanker.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/sassb360.jpg
I see it everywhere, but say nothing. I hope Richard and others who watermark artists’ works would reconsider.
Jim Burke
Blushing Books
Jim, I always thought Blushing Books was a pretty classy operation (although having said that it’s only fair I disclose to people that BB was a mainstay advertiser here at Spanking Blog throughout our early years). I think it’s awesome you don’t watermark artwork that you have the rights to, but I wouldn’t have any criticism if you did — that strikes me as entirely legitimate.
To be as fair as possible to Richard, though, I’m not aware of him ever having watermarked any artwork. His forte is vintage spanking photographs, often from popular culture rather than porn, that are obscure and hard to find. “Orphaned works” in many cases in copyright parlance, stuff that’s not available in commerce because (even though copyright has generally not expired) its owners are long gone or otherwise not making their ancient ephemera available in the modern marketplace.
In my mind the urgency of proper attribution goes way way way up in the case of something modern enough that its creator (or whomever else holds the rights) is still using it in commerce or otherwise hoping to make money or fame from it. And likewise, the disapprobation that rightly attaches to a false claim of ownership (like one’s name in a watermark) is proportionally stronger when there’s somebody out there whose desire to profit from their own work could be undercut by the false claim. To Richard’s credit, it’s my impression that he rarely (if ever) attaches his watermark to something that’s not pretty obviously and genuinely an orphaned work. I’m sure it’s possible that he’s erred in this respect, but if so I haven’t happened to notice.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying I deplore the behavior in your example, but I don’t attribute that behavior to Richard; I therefore want to emphasize that misappropriating without credit (or falsely claiming credit for) the work of living artists and active business enterprises is not precisely what this thread was about. If you were expanding the scope of the discussion, that’s fine; but we were actually talking about a category of moral error (if indeed it be, that’s the subject of some dispute between Richard and myself) that’s rather less universally condemned — falsely claiming credit for what are (in most cases at least) genuinely orphaned works.
First of all, SpankBoss, thank you for providing clarification. As SpankBoss said, Jim, what is being discussed here are the obscure vintage finds that I make. Any observer of my website will know, much like the Spanking Blog (save for ingrates like me :) ), each and every artistic contribution is fully credited. In fact I dare say that I work as hard as anyone in giving credit where it belongs.
What I did find ironic today as I read the latest comments was that while we are coming at it from vastly different angles, we are actually both talking about the same thing, taking credit for the work of others.
I’m a researcher and much like SpankBoss and Bethie used to do, my work isn’t confined to just finding rare pics, I also spend the time making them as presentable as they can be. Then when I post them other folks will come along and say “I’ll take that, and that, and this one, ohh, and that one over there”. SpankBoss shared here how frustrating Bethie found that, well on my end one site has over 400 of my finds and another over 100, and you guessed it, nobody will ever know who put the work in to discover them.
I don’t disagree with SpankBoss in theory at all, my complaint stems from simple etiquette. I should point out that 66% of the finds that I have paid for bear no mark whatsoever, and the rare mainstream ones I don’t touch unless I paid for a physical copy of the work. It is basic etiquette, if something is good enough to take then it should be good enough to acknowledge. If that happened I could guarantee to you, there wouldn’t be so much as the smallest marking anywhere on any pic from me. When you treat people with kindness they reciprocate.
I would hope that I never get to the point that Bethie and Harry got to, in that it becomes so frustrating that I stop sharing them altogether for lack of credit. We are both talking about etiquette here, it is just different as to how it applies to us.
[…] of late by multiple sites with not so much as a single acknowledgement from anyone. I remembered my DISCUSSION WITH SPANKBOSS years ago and it was because of that discussion that I am presenting everything here in full. So in […]
I joined a sorority and the paddling was a high spot for me, getting paddled, and later giving paddling. FUN!