Ugh! I uploaded a large set of pictures online at the end of last week and had them sent to my local Wal-mart for printing.  This was A LOT of pictures as I wanted to start replacing pictures that my grandparents lost in their housefire last week.  I was really quite proud of myself for thinking to do this and for acting so quickly.  However, I ended up leaving Wal-Mart quite unhappy.  I did get most of my photos, but they would not give me a handful of them (maybe 6 out of the 100).

And yes, I’m educated, and I do understand their reasoning, but I don’t like it. You see these were wedding pictures of my grandparents, and therefore, Wal-Mart pointed out that they were copyrighted because they were in fact wedding photography. That’s normally all fine and dandy, but I have two problems. First of all they were married in New York so how I would I ever even begin locate the photographer, and second, I probably couldn’t locate him because they were married 40+ years ago. Yes, I understand copyright. I know it’s intention, and I respect it, but I think maybe it’s time for laws to be changed.  Finding a New York wedding photographer from over forty years ago (especially since we live in Texas) is nearly impossible. Second even if I could locate him, I can almost guarantee that he would not still have these negatives and therefore, me printing these elsewhere is not costing him any money. Very few photographers would still have picture negatives after this long (heck! I’ve actually called for some old photos from Sears before to be told they were LONG destroyed, but they still would not sign over permission for me to copy them, but that’s an entirely different story.)

Another thing that really frustrates me about all this is that apparently the person who made the decision to pull out these photos is a complete moron. There were at least 10 to 12 more professional in-studio pictures (or school pictures) in this set that they did not pull out.  So it appears that they really have no idea what pictures are protected and which are not. They were just making arbitrary, uneducation decisions that are keeping my grandparents from restoring visual memories of their life together.  So what am I doing about it? Well first of all, not that it will do anything but make me feel better, but we will not be doing any shopping at Wal-Mart for a long time (I haven’t shopped at Beall’s Department Store in 6 years after I had a run-in with them). I’ve also submitted these same pictures to an online photo printer and ordered them. I’m crossing my fingers that they won’t question the pictures. We shall see.