NASA Spaceflight.com watermarking publically available images and stiking them on their pay only L2 site

NASA Watch didn't name NASA Spaceflight.com directly, but it's clear to me
that on NASA Watch, Keith was referring to NASA Spaceflight.com's practice
of watermarking publicly available images and sticking them on their pay
only L2 site.

Here is a recent NSF article:

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?cid=5097

The above links to this page to show off some "samples" of their "exclusive"
images:

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=7872&start=1

Here are a couple of the examples of their "exclusive" images on a public
NASA site:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/vision/technology/html/jsc2007e20977.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/vision/technology/html/jsc2007e20981.html

Here is what the NSF Managing Editor has to say in their online forum:

That's the idea. We intend for the whole site to be kick ass, with L2 -
which is about 40gb of info now) being even more so. We - like a lot of
other sites nowadays - need revenue streams to pay for the costs of
running it. Gone are the days where advertising covers things. Some
sites
ask you to pay for their news articles, some for their videos. We feel
our
subscription area is the best for space flight by far, allowing the rest
of the site to do for free what others charge for.

I absolutely know what people mean when they say money is tight, so I
try
and find a happy balance as much as possible.

Charging good money for L2 access and filling it with watermarked versions
of public images seems wrong to me. I'm certainly not going to pay of L2
access if this is the sort of "service" they provide.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)


.

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