This morning

I like this a lot! What's with the low rating???

I like this too. For some reason it reminds me of the Horsehead Nebula at the end of Orion's belt

COLORFUL CLOUDS 10+ with unique shapes and composition. The orange and black clouds representing the fall sky! Dramatic capture and thanks for sharing this GEM IN THE SKY!

Dear "Spiceisle":

On reflection, I think that you MAY well have been the gentleman with whom I had a fairly cordial discussion on this theme some months in the past, and whose answers to my questions were plausible ones. Certainly I have not previously brought up the issue with anyone else than that single individual.

Since we do not seem to witnessing any multiplication of this tendency, my concern is more academic than of practical importance. (I think at the time I may have attributed my objections to the practice to my own grouchiness, or to a kind of puritanism.)

My real concern is that the practice may catch on, at some point in the view, and disfigure some intolerable percentage of Weather Underground's vast repository of >1,000,000 images.

If that happened, I think you might find yourself more sympathetic than you are now to my own point of view. Let us hope that this never happens! (smile)

As you know, all human beings love their own children (until they grow up), but are largely indifferent to, or somewhat skeptical about, everyone else's children. I think that this discrepancy is telling us something important — about ALL of us!

Let me mention, in passing, that my strong impression is that such copyrights — at least as words or letters, on these often in themselves extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating images — STRONGLY VULGARIZE, or simply diminish the interest, of virtually ALL images.

Which is a shame.

Cordially,

— Patrick Gunkel (Princeton, NJ)

Dear Mr. Fenty:

Thank you in turn for your note, which I read with great interest, especially because of the details about how you have reluctantly dealt with this nettlesome situation.

I do not feel that there is anything I can add, however. Especially to your perplexities!

If you are not losing money that you invested, and the parties who do make it are, the real question may be: Is their actual profit great enough to warrant any legal challenge on your part, considering the cost to yourself, AND the heartache, AND the bother (all of which feed upon one another)?

This is not a world in which justice is easily gotten.

The only effect would probably be to drive them into some other person's nest, to rob the eggs of, and who when then suffer in turn from the propagating annoyance.

—————— * ——————

This is about all that I can add to this multifacetedly troublesome issue. I am certainly no lawyer, although my oldest and closest friend is a former Dean of Harvard Law School. (But Bob and I only talk about things OUTSIDE the law, such as my work in science, or what classical music is rarest and best.)

Wishing you the best, and hoping my remarks may have had at least some value or interest to you,

— Patrick Michael Gunkel (Princeton, NJ)