Site Forum

Reprints should not be scanned as originals.  That's coming from a big supporter of vintage reprint collecting.  

A reprint is not the original and should not be posted as such. No matter how close they get to the original, it's NOT the original. Of course, we still have problems of people posting parallels as base cards and base cards as parallels. To address the secondary issue of card ownership vs. scans, every card I post has been scanned by me, but they aren't all in my collection. My brother also collects cards (to a much lower degree than me) and he has some I don't, but he let me scan them. There's even one on my Wantlist that I posted the scan for. That should be the only reason for a scan posted by me but not in my collection. The only cards of his I've done are DC comics cards. Anything else means I simply forgot to add it to my collection!

People use this site for different purposes. Just because I own a card, doesn't mean I've had the opportunity to "add it to my collection" on here. Me, personally, I use the site right now to track complete sets or those that I'm attempting to complete. My want list has more than that, and I've actually gone in after trades (where transaction manager was correctly used by both parties) where the cards weren't part of sets, and deleted them from my "collection". I've also scanned cards before packing them up and shipping them to another collector (sale or trade). A lot of the newer inserts/parallels get scanned for here first, then I put them up on ebay.

So, in short, just because someone added a scan to the site, don't be alarmed if it's not in their collection.

As for reprints being used for the originals - personally, I'm not a fan. I'd rather see a beat up, creased card shown here than a clean reprint. Maybe Admin would rather see clean-looking cards. I don't know. I can't speak for Admin! :)

A scan is a scan is a scan. Whether you did it personally or someone else did it. If this site only allowed personally owned and scanned images we'd have a very small fraction of the images we currently have.  There a lot of sites with checklists of cards. But the #1 thing that puts this site head and shoulders above the rest are the card images.

When I first joined the site, I found a couple online scans of some 1/1 wrestling cards from sets with no images. In my mind, it seemed useful to have at least one scan as a sample for every set ever made, for reference sake. But then a topic came up in the forums and some said we shouldn't use scans unless we did it ourselves, maybe because of copyright reasons. I can't remember exactly, but I quit doing it.

The only one who owns copyright to card images is the card company that produced them. That's what I hate about COMC.com. They watermark them as if they own the rights to the card images.  Using copyrighted material for educational/reference purposes is allowed. Otherwise no images would be allowed on this site.

I don't mind using other people's scans as long as the scan accurately reflects the card identified--not a reprint for an original. 

I have no issue with what COMC does because in their case, the scan respresents a specific copy of a card, it is not there as a general reference.  They don't want someone else borrowing their images and claiming them as their own (like so many do on eBay) and misrepresenting what that third party is selling.