| Jon Clark - BANNED FOR LIFE |
06-09-2006 03:20 AM |
I have something to add, Blue Blood has been called out repeatedly in public to respond to rumors that the pre-launch BlueBlood.com megasite, which already boasts 60,000+ images, also has a license to add approximately a fifth of the content from SuicideGirls. This is Blue Blood founder Amelia G's official response to these allegations:
As you may know, a bulk content package called Content Pinup and describing itself as, "Over 19,000 Images of 20 Suicide Girls" recently surfaced for sale to webmasters. In addition to my own work and Forrest Black's, I publish other photographers every week on my sites, so, in order to provide the best value for my site members, I would normallypick up a license to any decent appropriately themed material which came on the market. The provenance of this particular package with images going for just a bit more than two cents each seemed questionable, so Ivery nearly skipped it entirely.
However Jonathan Silverstein aka J$tyle$ was marketing the package and he said, "I've been in this business for 10 years and the only thing I have in this world is my word and my balls. I don't break either for noone!" I had met up withJonathan Silverstein on a number of occasions with people I respect. So, after consulting with some of the talent which appears on the Content Pinup DVD, I decided to move forward to acquire a license to the package.
Before I say anything else, I want to state unequivocally that Jonathan Silverstein and Content Pinup were totally professional in all my dealings with them and neither I nor my affiliate program SpookyCash nor my overall company Blue Blood has any problem or dispute whatsoever with anyone from Content Pinup or Blowout. I believe that they did the best they could in what turned out to be a bad situation.
When the Content Pinup package was first offered for sale, a number of webmasters expressed concern that the terms of the license were very limiting. Blue Blood was only interested in the content in a very limited way, so there was only one sentence in the contract which concerned me: "Licensee MAY NOT use any Suicide Girls name, logo ortrademarks anywhere on Licensee's website(s) or otherwise." I found this sentence vague, confusing, and potentially overreaching, so I asked Jonathan Silverstein for an explanation. His clarification sounded fine to me, so I provided the much clearer replacement sentence, "As the Licensor is not Suicide Girls, nor any of the models, this licensespecifically DOES NOT confer any special rights to use the Suicide Girls name (registration Serial Number 76408248) or logo (registration Serial Number 76408240) or any particular model pseudonym in previews on licensee's paysites, banners, designs, logos, TGPs or MGPs created with this material."
SG's attorney Paul Loving rejected the clarification of that one sentence, stalling for more than a month, refusing to enumerate what trademarks he was trying to protect. If SuicideGirls owns some of the model pseudonyms or characters, such as Missy Suicide, I was willing to respect their intellectual property rights and avoid infringing.SuicideGirls was, however, unwilling to state which model pseudonyms they felt were SG trademarks. It was going, however, to be a dealbreaker for me if the Content Pinup package could only be published with fake names and fake profiles for the models pictured. No third parties appeared to have any input on this deal, apart from the brokers and SG's attorney.
So SG's attorney Paul Loving had the position to block Blue Blood from getting the content, when Blue Blood would have presented the images respectfully. It seems reasonable to conclude from this that surely SG also had the position to block less flattering sites from receiving the content, but they allowed sites which would make up fake names and fake personas for the girls to receive the content. Which makes it seem like the source of the Content Pinup package may not have been some manbearpig phantom, as has been suggested, but perhaps someone seeking to specifically embarrass and distress the individual models in the pictures.
I don't know how much SG edited these photo sets before publishing whichever ones they published, but, after seeing a more complete preview, I concluded that, if SG signed off on our license to the content, Blue Blood would still not publish all the content on the DVD as SG's photography is much worse than I had thought, using bracketingrather than metering the light properly and sometimes missing the girl in the shot. I would not have wanted to run any photographs which would have embarrassed either the models or the Blue Blood brand with the poorness of the image quality. Photographers license their work for publication all the time. There is nothing wrong with that. But, if aphotographer promises a model that a shoot will not be licensed, then it is reprehensible to do so.
"When models sell their photosets to SuicideGirls, they can be sure of what the pictures will be used for . . . It would be surprising if they suddenly found that their images were sold to a different site without their consent or knowledge, or were being altered, or were being misrepresented, but nothing like that happens."
--Olivia Ball, purported co-owner of SuicideGirls, Nov 18, 2005 post on SuicideGirls.com
"Well, you could argue [that it arrived with] Blue Blood magazine or The Probe--but absolutely, they were very underground . . . I'm not gonna say that we don't exploit the girls, because I don't know. I think that five years from now I will know."
--Sean Suhl, CEO of SuicideGirls, Jan 30, 2003 issue of The Stranger
Sean Suhl used to work as a clerk at a punk store on Melrose, selling copies of Blue Blood magazine over the counter. Given how inspirational he says Blue Blood was to him, it is no surprise that there is crossover between SuicideGirls and Blue Blood in terms of talent we publish. Sometimes Blue Blood works with someone first and sometimes SuicideGirls does.
People keep asking me what I would have done with the content from this package, if SG's attorney had not blocked the sale. I don't think it is a secret that, in addition to being a writer and a photographer, I am an editor and a publisher. So, the short answer is that I would have edited the sets down to what I felt was a good fit for Blue Blood and then Iwould have published that edit. The long answer is as follows. I'm going to list what I believe to be the content of the DVD package in reverse alphabetical order, along with what my likely edit would have been. I will list the content by model pseudonyms as they were listed in the Content Pinup preview. These are pseudonyms which may or may not be owned by SG or the models and I utilize them here merely for simplicity and with no intent to challenge any existing trademarks.
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How about my sig!
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