Hello guys.

I was made aware that issues relating to my photos were causing problems for some people on this site.
Actually, to test it out I just went to the pics in the album on this site and could right click and save each one of mine. When I tried to right click at other locations on the board it was blocked.

When I provided photos to the board owner - Sherrie, who does a great job with this site btw, I did ask that she try and make them not 'downloadable' just as they are on my site. How that is done is beyond my control or knowledge - that's why I hired a professional webmaster. I was completely unaware until one hour ago that it was making the entire site non-rightclickable.
Since it has caused undue stress on some people - it's fine with me if people want to downloand the images of mine that are on this site - as long as they are for personal use, and they are not reproduced anyplace else without express permission.

Of course I recognize that people on probably an hourly basis are illegally downloading photos from my site, but yes - in an attempt to limit that - I do try to have the function blocked. That way, people are at least aware of the copyright policy, etc. Also, each skater I photograph knows that I won't release any photo they don't approve of, nor provide them to fan sites, etc. without their permission. Anything that's up on the internet can always be captured - no matter how sophisticated the strategy against it. That's why if, for example, I kept a collection of photos that might be used for a book,I would not put the vast majority up on the net because then you could offer a publisher never seen photos.

One reason I limit downloading is that photos of another skater I photographed have often turned up for sale with his image on different items (key chains, clothing, etc.) that were never approved by himself nor his management company.

And finally once last year, only hours before a skater was scheduled to arrive in town - I went to a Ritz photo store at a mall to have a CD of photos printed of my own photos - some that I didn't have on hand but had downloaded from the net. I intended to have said skater autograph them for friends. When I returned to pick them up...no photos. The manager refused to believe they were my pictures as it was obvious some had been downloaded from the internet. I tried to show him my driver's license so he could see it matched the copyright, but it didn't matter to him. Because they were intenet images, he said that meant they were almost always being printed illegally and he refused to print them.


Thanks,
KB