ACSearch - Interesting Email

I received this email today. Curious if folks know what is going on?

"Dear Sir or Madam,

we wish you a late Happy New Year!

Unfortunately, we must inform you that we have deactivated all auction images of the following Auction Houses for German and Austrian users:

For German users:
- Fritz Rudolf Künker GmbH & Co. KG
- Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger
- Gorny & Mosch Giessener Münzhandlung
- Numismatik Lanz

For Austrian users:
- Auktionshaus H. D. Rauch GmbH

The abovementioned auction houses have called upon to remove their data from acsearch.info. Unfortunately, requests for an amicable settlement have been blocked.

Timing and the way of proceeding lead us to assume a coordinated effort by those companies, aiming to drive acsearch.info out of the market.

We always try to consider the concerns of our partners among Auction Houses. We are, however, first and foremost committed to the interests of acsearch.info and its users. To avoid any legal risks, but ex gratia, we have decided to only follow the request where rights may be concerned. The auction images of those companies have therefore been deactivated for German and/or Austrian users.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,
your acsearch.info team"

I make a lot of decisions on my key coins using ACSearch and other great databases. The database helped me with this one among MANY others!:


RR Anon AR Didrachm 280-275 Mars-Horse FIRST

 

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That's too bad, I use it often and have often found many coins I acquire to have been something like the second or third one, where other areas it wouldn't exist as easily.

 

That is easy, just boycott those auction houses. Write to them and tell them why.

If you anything from Lanz you obviously don't mind tooling and "restoration" to a sickening degree anyway.

 

Are you in Germany or Austria? If not, I assume you'll still see the pictures on ACSEARCH.

Also, as I read this e-mail, it appears to refer only to images. I assume they're protecting the copyright of the coins' pictures. You cannot copyright the descriptions of the coins, since facts are not copyrightable. So the descriptions might still appear on ACSEARCH.

 

United States here. However, frequent visitor of Europe (and lived there as an expat). Understood about images, and that was my conclusion also due to the descriptions/attributes will remain. However, very curious as to why these auction houses are doing this. And, why is it only the German and Austrian auction houses pressing to remove images?

@Theodosius :
"That is easy, just boycott those auction houses. Write to them and tell them why.
If you anything from Lanz you obviously don't mind tooling and "restoration" to a sickening degree anyway."

I do agree completely, especially about the L-word! However, I have enjoyed Kunker's auctions.

 

Since Lanz, especially, is in the business of re-engraving and tooling the coins in their auctions, it makes sense that they don't want before and after (tooling) pictures of the same coin showing up on other ancient coin sites. I assume this is an effort on their part to suppress those before/after comparison photos.

 

Thank you. My thoughts also. Concerns me about the other auctions following suit. If THEY have had similar "concerns". Intersting. I have only used Kunker (successfully), in the past, and really do not know the others.

 

Could it have something to do with the new German cultural property laws? Why allow US and others to access the photos and not Germans or Austrians?

 

I am in the UK. I cannot see any Lanz coins in the results with or without images. G&M still seem to be there.

 

I wonder now about other auctions houses wanting to hide "work" done on their coins...

If anything, past images of coins from auctions help with cultural property issues rather than hurting them (if they are old enough). This seems to be working against their own interests unless they have something to hide.

 

Given a direct link to a Lanz coin, such as https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=339668 , can you see anything?

 

Yes. Interesting. I can see that but don't appear to be getting any Lanz coins in the search results.

 

To avoid being geo-located many people use proxy servers. You can search for others, but one that might work is https://www.proxysite.com . Go there, enter acsearch.info, click Go, and see if you can still see the search results that are missing when you use the normal access procedure.

If it works, and you were planning on saving any auction text or images for your research, now is the time to save them.

 

I am in the US. On acsearch I see Lanz coins. A search on
Numismatik Lanz
brings up many items.

 

Reading between the lines, acsearch seems to believe this is an effort to put them out of business which raises the question of whether those firms have interest in any other coin search sites (like CoinArchives?) that might benefit from the elimination of acsearch. Do providers of image material for acsearch get any cut of the fees charged by acsearch for its full members? Should they?

As far as search engines go, how many would pay a little extra for a service that would allow eliminating results from certain specified sellers? Imagine being able to eliminate fake sellers, known criminals, toolers and overcharge artists from search returns. This would be most usefule for eBay but in the case of auction results it might be nice to be able to tell real sales from buy backs and unsolds reported at estimate. That would not be easy to program. Just allowing 'not Lanz' or something similar would be simple and still cut down hits to things you might want to see.

 

I'd like to be able to tell vcoins to only show me US sellers.

Ebay has this feature which I use all the time.

I hate dealing with the import restrictions so I almost never buy overseas. Only when they have good paperwork to clearly show the item is ok to export.

 

Has anyone written to the auction houses in question and asked them what their reasons were for pulling their photos? I've never won anything from any of them, but if anyone on the list here is a frequent customer, he or she might get an explanation.

I can think of two possibilities:

1) Maybe they object to someone making money of their copyrighted photos or the parties couldn't agree on royalty payments.

2) It might be hard to set an opening bid of, say, 500 Euros on a coin that the record shows sold for 200 Euros 3 years ago, even if the coin is worth 500.

 

But why allow US patrons to view and not Germans? That's the weird part in my opinion.

 

Apparently Lars Rutten is now affiliated with Leu, so that must be the root of the issue.

 

This is entirely possible. Another reason could be that the auction houses involved in the boycott just dislike the fact collectors can research and compare prices. It is not to their advantage.
Whatever the reason, very sad to see a major part of this invaluable resource now diluted. The only alternative (that I know of) is coinarchives, but at considerable more cost such that I believe only auction houses use it.

Whatever the case, I will definitely patronize the auction houses involved to a much lesser extent (if at all) in the future.