Vladi Wizard's Musings

Seems of late I have been reading quite a bit about the failure of some pay sites within the community are closing down. Some are putting the blame on peer-to-peer sites in general, while others are placing the blame on The Wizard ’ s Lair in particular. Now, without knowing the financial specifics of each and every website that is closing down and/or losing money, how can anyone place any blame on any one thing in particular, or even accuse a single website, it ’ s webmaster, and it ’ s contributors for contributing to the financial decline of these sites? When I look around, I see that everyone is feeling the financial pinch, influenced largely by the (ever) rising cost of fuel, which has a cascading effect on everything from car sales, to food costs. People all over are doing everything that they can to save money, from driving less, to canceling vacations, and to eliminating discretionary expenses, of which would include memberships to websites. Is anyone looking at pointing to ...

Well... some of my images that I sent up to Flickr violated the TOS there and I got a nasty gram from the folks there because some of my images violated another person's copyright. Acckkkk!! Never my intention! Thus I quickly scrambled in a mad panic to remove everything from my flickr account!! Then... I did some thinking. All the images that I got I have gathered from the web, for free. Most, if not all, of the images that I collect have been taken from newsgroups, of which someone else has taken from another site and then uploaded to the newsgroup. And many, if not most, are 5 years old, or older! Many are 10 years old! It's not as if the original photographer and the like have not had time to profit from these images. Anyway, I have not altered any of the images. I do not do like many and crop out the copyright and/or the artists 'signatures'. Indeed, I very very rarely rename the images (beyond the adding numerical date at times to those that are just called ...