Theory about 1919 White Sox team issue.

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Posted By: warshawlaw

If you are going to fake a card, why not fake a copyright too? I know only a little about copyright law (a little knowledge is always a dangerous thing) but I understand that as national and international copyright laws have changed over the years, the requirements for copyright markings have changed too. The existence of a copyright mark (depending on form and language used) might actually disprove the age of an article. Any copyright lawyers out there want to chime in?

I would be reticent to plunk down big bucks on an obscure issue that did not surface until relatively recently (say the last ten to fifteen years) unless it was accompanied by copious documentation of its origin (for example, memos and other materials from the manufacturer). The odds of it being a fake are just too great, unless there is serious provenance evidence.

The provenance arguments made as to this White Sox set are good examples of what I mean. Essentially, several people have argued that the cards must be good because a number of people have paid for them before. That doesn't mean squat. True provenance is established from accepted independent sources, not what some ninny paid for something. Take M116 as an example. We have verifiable contemporary sources that establish exactly how the cards were issued and what went into them. We "know" as a matter of historical fact (at least as best as history can be established) that the cards were issued by Sporting Life in several series, etc. T206, we know from advertisements from the day too.

Unless there are independent sources of information an opinion about what a card is is no more than one person's opinion. Take the archangel of card cataloguing, Jeff Burdick. He opined that there were Hustler T206 cards. There are none. He made a human error. Now, if a Hustler card were to surface, the seller could say that Burdick catalogued it so it must have existed but was extremely rare. Absent serious documentation, however, I would deem it a fake. For that reason, I am leery of cards like the Allegheny set. How do we know it wasn't a really good, well conceived forgery?