Perhaps the only recourse today for punishing unethical behavior is exposing it. The American Iris Society recently had a nasty information theft. As the world’s registrar for iris we have an only checklist called The Register. The register has all registered names and all names that have been reserved by hybridizers for future use listed. Only irises since 1950 have their registration descriptions there. It is useful to hybridizers to check if a name has been used already so they do not try to register that name for a new iris. AIS also has the Iris Encyclopedia which is a wiki like the PBS wiki but just for irises and the iris family. A couple of month’s ago we got E-mails saying ‘All Things Plants’ had stolen the wiki. Actually on checking it out they had copied to their files the Iris Register. This was very obvious since they listed all the irises that did not yet exist but had names reserved. Upon further research we discovered they did the same to the daylily society, the daffodil society and even to the Royal Horticultural Society. ATP seems to be an immense platform of stolen material. Some of the societies decided they could not fight it and just got a link back as a reward. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dennis Kramb" <dkramb@badbear.com> To: "Pacific Bulb Society" <pbs@lists.ibiblio.org> Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2014 3:56:52 PM Subject: Re: [pbs] image theft - somewhat off I find it annoying and absurd when I see Iris photos that I took 15 years ago being used (without permission) on eBay and such. First of all, those pictures are old & crappy compared to my newer photos. Secondly, how can you be so lame to grow Irises for sale & yet be too lazy to take your own photos. Pretty damned pathetic. If you're going to steal my pics, at least steal the good ones. Dennis in Cincinnati -- Bob Pries Zone 7a Roxboro, NC (336)597-8805 _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.ibiblio.org http://pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/