uncredited use of GCD cover scans?

[Donald Dale Milne]

    An indexer has told me that the site
https://www.pricecharting.com/category/comic-books is using our cover
scans without our posting our licensing disclaimer.  I have looked at
the site and our disclaimer is not posted.  I have looked at a half
dozen of his scans and they do appear to be the same as ours, but I
cannot tell for certain.  Are any of you familiar with this site?  Do
you see any scans that are unquestionably the same as ours?

- Don Milne

[Alexandros Diamantidis]

I checked various images from that site (which I was not familiar with),
and they don't seem to be copying cover scans from us wholesale - first
of all, we have scans for many books they have not and vice versa, and
many other scans are obviously different.

After checking a few books, I see that their and our scans for The
Walking Dead #19 are unquestionably the same:

https://www.pricecharting.com/game/comic-books-walking-dead/the-walking-dead-19-2005
https://www.comics.org/issue/260222/cover/4/

They have the same pixel dimensions (400x632) and overlaying the two
images and taking their difference shows them differing on only some
JPEG compression artifacts.

I see at https://www.pricecharting.com/contribute that after using the
site frequently for some time you are given contributor privileges and
can upload cover scans. So, my guess is that some users of the site have
taken scans from us and uploaded them there.

I think there is no use worrying about that... We don't hold any rights
over the individual cover scans, since we are displaying them under fair
use provisions and an exact scan of an item doesn't confer any
additional copyright; it is owned only by the original copyright
holders.

Many of our cover scans are after all sourced by other sites with
attribution only in the changeset comments, and most sites rely on the
same fair use reasoning to display them. Even our own covers FAQ
states:

"Nobody can stop you if you click on each cover you want and save it to
your computer. We claim no copyright to either the images or the scans.
An acknowledgement of the fact that they came from the GCD would be
nice."

Alexandros

* Donald Dale Milne [2023-05-08 18:10]:

[Donald Dale Milne]

    Thanks for the research, Alexandros.  If they do not seem to be
using our scans wholesale, I agree that there is nothing to pursue
here.  They might even get a few odd submissions from our own members!

- Don Milne