eMoviePoster.com

We are often asked "why do you watermark all your images?", both on our current auctions and in our image archives. Well, back in the days when we were younger and more trusting (and there was not yet an Internet), we published 24 books filled with great movie poster images. My partner Richard Allen and I went to great lengths locating and photographing thousands of posters for these books, often having them professionally restored prior to photography, so the images could display the posters to their full advantage, and we spent vast sums of money on this project.
     Well then the Internet came along, and all sorts of people starting scanning our books (without permission or credit) and they would put them online in websites, often winning "Best of the Net" Awards. They felt that it was fine that we went to all the trouble and expense to create these books, and that once we did they could use the results of our labor as their own.
     Of course the problem with this "Internet socialism" is that it killed the market for our books (because as soon as we published them the images would appear online in several places) and even though our printed images were far superior, it still meant we could only sell a few books, so we had to quit publishing, which meant everyone loses.
     So when we started our online auctions we only use images that have been watermarked with our website name, and even that doesn't stop some of these people, for they use photoshop programs to remove our watermarks (and one company even then blows them up and sells them as repro posters).
     And of course there are still people all over the Internet taking our books, scanning them, and then trying to sell the images on CDs. Go to http://bwcpublishing.com/movie/cds/west_posters.html to see one such person, who has "borrowed" our images without permission or compensation, and is offering them for sale on a CD:
     So until there is a way for us to protect the images we take, we will only use watermarked images!