About the new Dark Shadows photos ...

A handful of photos from the new Dark Shadows movie have leaked online. In addition to the Vanity Fair photos (which I posted on March 1) are a few photos that look to be from Kathryn Leigh Scott's upcoming book Dark Shadows: Return to Collinwood.

I will not be posting the latter photos. Here's why:

Posting copyrighted material is not the murky issue we want to make it out to be. If you don't have the rights to a property, intellectual or otherwise, you don't have the right to make any decisions regarding its use. Bloggers, myself included, routinely ignore this fact.

I posted the Vanity Fair images because my audience and that particular magazine's audience have little to nothing in common. If it was a magazine devoted to Dark Shadows then it would be a monumentally sleazy thing for me to scan and post their images. Because the television show and upcoming movie are incidental to the content of their  magazine it feels like no foul has been committed by posting the Vanity Fair images (and makes it only modestly sleazy.) It might even result in a few more copies of the magazine being sold to Dark Shadows fans who barely know the publication exists.

But I doubt the publishers (and attorneys) of Vanity Fair would agree. If they sent me a message asking me to take down their photos I'd happily oblige.

That being said, I don't need to wait for a message from Pomegranate Press, Kathryn Leigh Scott or Jim Pierson to inform me that I would be out of line for posting images from their new book ... especially when you consider these photos are an attractive part of Return to Collinwood's content. A great deal of time, effort and money went into the creation of this book. If you want to see more publications devoted to Dark Shadows then it's a good idea not to undermine the integrity of these products, especially before they even hit the stands.

The images are already out there. If you want to see them they're just a Google search away. But you won't find them here.