Not to beat this to death, but.....
I run a business that is driven by licensing. The Hobby and Gift business.
In that sense, understand and actually support companies collecting licensing/royalty fees for proprietary information, images etc. that they own.
It cost them money to take the photos, forgetting that they may well have been used for training, parts manuals or whatever as opposed to having any historical significance, then or n ow.
It costs money to copy them, microfilm them or, nowadays transfer them to digital images suitable for computers.
And....whatever other costs they incur to get them to folks like us.
In many cases like this the firm or government charge a reasonable fee that probably covers their cost and maybe a bit more. Others make it a profit center, specifically licensing, where if you wish to just use the name Chevrolet you pay a pretty healthy fee for essentially a few exchanges of correspondence.
The baffling part for me is that there are so many companies, apparently Ford in this case, that are just totally un-cooperative or downright obstructive when it comes to sharing their historical materiel. Even if you offer to pay for it, which years ago I used to do as did many authors of our beloved books.
Both Bart V and Fred Crismon had some real horror stories of entire rooms of archives of the type that we seek as the Holy Grail being dumped into the trash tips by many companies and governmental organizations over the years.
Well, enough, just another two cents :dh:
Bill
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