I'm not selfish! I swear!

Don't you hate it when you surf the internet and find a website that displays your cels and not even acknowledge that they belong to somebody else?

Here's the story. I'm a big fan of the anime of the 70's-80's, especially Candy Candy, and I've tried to get good quality cels of this anime for my collection. I try to make them look as best as posible in my gallery, adding information about what's happening in the scene, add a background, what's the episode number, and a screencap, you know how it is. Obviously if you're displaying them in your gallery it's because you want to share them with other fans and collectors.

Before I started getting new CC cels last years (when I started collecting again after a few years away from the hobby), I visited a french website dedicated to this manga/anime, and there I found a section of cels. They all had the watermark of the website and you would obviously assume they belong to the webmistress. I even pm'd her congratulating her for her collection.

So, months later I check 'her collection' and surprise!! I see my cels on her website, with her watermark and with no mention that they belong to me. So I did what any other cel collector I know would've done, I contacted the webmistress in a polite way and asked her to remove the cels from her website because they belonged to me....

... what did I get? she defended herself saying that she is not using my pics (or scans) of the cels in her website, but she took them from the dealers/auctions and she put them there, so she is not really using my cels and that I have no right to ask her to remove them. She said that no matter what, she was not going to change her mind.

I emailed again and explained that even if the pics were not the same, the image shown in the cel belongs to me and that I'd appreciated it if she would remove them. What I got was another nasty negative reply, and she basically told me that I was being selfish because not everybody had the chance to buy cels especially of such important anime. So for what I could see she was trying to be the prophet of the CC cels world and she was displaying them right there so everybody could see them. I told her that I have a gallery to show them to everybody and didn't need them displayed in other gallry, but no matter what her answer was always no. At the end she told me not to email her again cos she was not going to reply me. Needless to say I threw her email address to the black list of my mailbox.


I got really pissed off, you know? We all know all the trouble and money involved in getting our cels, then display them so everybody can see them, and I got this? I got so upset with this person that if she thought I was selfish, then let's give her a reason to really think that I was selfish and made the Candy Candy cels in the private area of my gallery.

All this happened by Christmas and as some people have emailed me to ask what happened to my CC cels I decided to post this.

*Sigh* Things would always be a lot better if people learned to respect each other.