The web page for condo sales at The Toy Factory in Brooklyn. Tudor’s factory is now building of high-end condos.
As a writer, it’s always disconcerting to find your words in a place where they’re not supposed to be. That happened a number of years ago when I typed “176 Johnson Street” into an Internet search engine. Shockingly, up came a page for the The Toy Factory Lofts in Brooklyn.
The first shock was that Tudor’s old factory had been converted to condos. Expensive ones at that, and this page was the entry point for shopping for one of them.
The second shock, and this was more of a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, was that when you clicked on the “History” tab, there were my words. And there was also an image that we had given to Miggle Toys.
The text and the photo had been stripped right off the Miggle electric football history page — in toy “talk” from the time of Norman Sas, they had been “borrowed.” Almost verbatim. And there wasn’t even an attribution. Whoever created the content for the page decided that my words fit their purposes…and to hell with all that copyright and permission nonsense. The Internet was a brave new world and there were condos to sell. Who has time to “do the right thing?”
I fired off an e-mail but the page was long dead (it’s totally gone now). For a long time I wrestled with how I felt about the commandeering of my text. If they just would have asked, I would have been honored to have my words tied to the building where Tudor once resided. I might have written something for them myself.
The shock and dark vibe has faded away, and as posted recently, I have visited the building. That my words ended up being tied to the Tudor factory — even in anonymous form — is pretty cool.
But we did learn something from it all, and we made certain to ask permission for all the images we used in The Unforgettable Buzz. Tracking down the proper owners for some images took years, and in the end, our vigilance cost us money because permissions usually aren’t free. Making this outlay more painful was the fact that most owners would probably never have any idea that we used their images in our book.
But we remember well how it felt when somebody used our work in a totally unauthorized way. Yes, we’re now in the brave new world of social media. But it doesn’t mean we should forget common decency — or how to do the right thing.
Earl
