>>For me, the great irony of this situation is that Campagnolo is
>>punctilious in its persecution/prosecution of anyone who would
>>deign to manufacturer reproduction replacement parts, even when
>>Campagnolo no longer produces those pieces.
>> Fred Rednor - Arlington, Virginia (USA)
The book is not published by Campagnolo, so don't blame them. While it must have Campagnolo's blessing (note the copyrighted trademarks all over), the official publishers are Bolis Edizioni (Italy) and VeloPress (USA). I doubt Campagnolo did more than make sure the trademarks were used correctly.
Somebody commented on the editors being partially to blame. That is absolutely true. From my experience in publishing books, poor-resolution images like the many "stolen" ones in the Campagnolo book don't just slip through. For our book "The Competition Bicycle," we accidentally submitted an incorrect file with low resolution for a single, small image in the back of the book. The printer immediately caught this, and let us know. We submitted the correct file, and all is well. Then we got proofs, and we could check each image. Only after we had approved the proofs did the book go to print. (Of course, we did use a high-end printer, whereas the Campagnolo book was printed in China, but I suspect the basic process is the same.)
If somebody submitted a book to Vintage Bicycle Press with a bunch of not attributed, low-resolution images, alarm bells would ring. And once I find that the images are borrowed without bothering to ask for permission (when you obtain images with permission, you usually get high-resolution files), I would have doubts about the text, too.
The big risk for a careless publisher is a copyright infringement suit from somebody whose original images were stolen (and there are plenty of low-resolution images of Merckx and other racers that must belong to somebody). The plaintiff could get an injunction that would stop distribution of the book until the suit is settled. And with books being published on credit, that would hurt the publisher. So I am surprised they are so careless.
Most of all, for online images, it is easy to find the owner of the web site, and thus obtain permission for reproduction. If you have images from old magazines, it's much harder. I had one image of Francesco Moser's hour record that I wanted for our new book, but try as we might, we could not find the owner. The photographer had switched agencies, and nobody seemed to know where he was. With the help of several friends and photographers in Europe, I tried for weeks to find him, but in the end, substituted a different image for which we could obtain the rights. We could have scanned the double-page spread of the first image as it was printed in Miroir du Cyclisme. We wanted to print the image much smaller, so the resolution would have been OK. But it would have been wrong, and risky.
Jan Heine
Editor
Bicycle Quarterly
140 Lakeside Ave #C
Seattle WA 98122
http://www.bikequarterly.com