2005-06-03 Letter to Liquid Blue

From VBZwiki

The following letter was sent to Liquid Blue (via email, attached as a Word document) in response to their new image policy. As of this writing, I have received no response from them.

At this point, then, I have to assume I do not have permission to use the images posted on their web site, and we certainly do not have access to the alternative FTP site, so I now have the following options for obtaining images of new items:

• purchase samples and photograph them (expensive, and sometimes actual items are not available right away)
• scan images from catalogs (low-resolution, and sometimes obscured by text and other markings)
• ignore the implicit warning not to use the web site images and wait for an explicit warning (if they decide to be draconian about it, they can terminate our business relationship with no warning at all)
• instead of providing an image on our site, provide a link to Liquid Blue's retail page displaying the item
• instead of providing an image on our site, use Liquid Blue's images directly, with "height=" tags to scale them to our needs (HTML scaling is generally of poor quality, this prevents us from cropping the images for use in thumbnails, and Liquid Blue probably would not see a difference between serving the images off their site and copying them to our site).

Suggestions on this issue are welcome.

[edit] Letter

Kathleen Alexander

Sales Administrator

Liquid Blue, Inc.

Dear Ms. Alexander,

Please find attached a modified and signed “Content & Imagery Copyright Policy”. I made certain addenda to the policy before signing it, and I thought I should explain the situation first so you wouldn't get the impression I was trying to be difficult about this – really, I'm not! ;-)

The problem is that the “refrain from manipulation” restrictions being placed upon usage of images from Liquid Blue's archive will, in essence (if I am not misunderstanding) make those images more or less useless to us for anything except reference purposes. In order to use them on the web, we definitely need (at the very least) to be able to scale them to particular heights – and it has long been our custom to spend a great deal of time and effort on additional processing, such as backgrounds, in order to make the merchandise more appealing and to fit in better with our site's look-and-feel. (For some examples, see http://www.vbz.net/cat/lb/rr/ .)

Let me cut straight to what appears to be happening – and please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this. I get the impression that Liquid Blue is perhaps trying to discourage retailers from having a large disparity between items available for sale in their store and items actually kept in stock. (This issue arises only with online stores, and hence would not have been an issue until such stores began to proliferate in the past few years.) By restricting the usage of your images in ways that effectively prevent us from actually using them, Liquid Blue would essentially be saying “if you want images for your web site, buy the merchandise and take your own photos”. If Liquid Blue will be pursuing a policy of requiring retailers to only sell what they stock, I would like to know for certain that this is the case so that we can adjust our business strategy appropriately.

If it was not Liquid Blue's intention to effectively impose such a policy, then I will be happy to work with you on a compromise image policy so that we can effectively continue to use Liquid Blue's images while protecting the copyright holders' rights.

The addendum I have inserted after the (otherwise unaltered) text of Liquid Blue's new “Content & Imagery Copyright Policy” reflects the extent of modifications which we would need to make in order to use the images on our web site.

Please note that we have a long history of making effort to give credit where credit is due. We are one of the few online t-shirt retail sites which have links back to the manufacturers' web sites, and we also go to great lengths to discover the artist(s) of each piece and credit them too.

Please feel free to email me at the address above.

Thank you!

<signature image>

Nick Staddon

Red House Media / vbz.net

[edit] Agreement

(The next page of the letter was Liquid Blue's copyright agreement, with the following amendments appended.)

Retailer Amendments to this agreement:

• We will need to:
  • scale the images to our standard sizes in order to fit with the layout of our existing images and pages. Fixed image sizes are currently: **thumbnail - 144 pixels high; small - 250 pixels high; larger sizes are more flexible.
  • modify the “background” of the images, i.e. the blank (usually white) area surrounding the actual merchandise image, by making it transparent or adding surrounding image work to make the product image more interesting/appealing and/or to make the image overall more in keeping with the look and feel of our web site
  • rotate and crop the images for use in “close-up” thumbnails
  • save files in a different format (e.g. PNG or JPEG) or in the same format with different parameters, for the purpose of fine-tuning a file's compression level or for allowing features only available in such formats (e.g. PNG background transparency).
• We will, however, be sure to preserve Liquid Blue's original copyright notice where possible; where said copyright notice is cropped out of the image or otherwise rendered unreadable or excessively inconspicuous, we will insert a new one of the same text and general appearance.