Sean,
In theory, both you and Bruce are right. From a purely moral and ethical
standpoint the "unknowing middlemen" should have to reimburse their
customers. But what about practical matters? How many of those
"middlemen" have $20,000 or $30,000 or more free cash laying around that
they can hand over in reparations? Not many, would be my guess,
particularly in the current economic situation. These people may want to
refund the money, but they simply may not be able to.
Also consider what their situation is if they were truly innocent
"middlemen"... like someone selling on consignment. They may have been
given $20,000 for the fake, but they only made a 10% or 20% commission
on the deal... maybe $2,000 to $4,000 bucks. They passed the bulk of the
$20,000 on to whomever they got the poster from in the first place.
Since they didn't get to keep the whole $20,000 in the first place, why
should they have to cough up the whole $20,000 to pay back the last
buyer in the chain?
And then there's the daisy chain effect. How many times did a particular
fake change hands among innocent buyers and sellers before the
highly-skilled fraud was detected? Maybe for some of these fakes there
is a long change of multiple sales and trades involving many people who
got, exchanged and spent money generated from the sale of the fake and
none of them knew it was fake (and most of whom do not have the money to
repay... and who do they repay it to, anyway? That's where the courts
come in -- they have to figure out who owes what to whom and how much
guilt or innocence each link in the chain contained).
In other words, it's a royal mess. And chances are very little will ever
be recovered or repaid on most of these fakes. Those who bought them
from a well-heeled auction house like Heritage who could afford to
refund the money (and who probably had an insurance company helping them
out on that) are the lucky ones. Many of the others will ever get much
if any of their money back, regardless of the outcome of court cases.
The scary thing is that, in many of the court cases, there may be legal
decisions which don't favor the buyers at all. After all, except for a
couple of upscale dealers/auctioneers, these posters were sold "as is".
They did not come with a guarantee of anything and legally most of the
sellers are probably not libel according to the letter of the law.
This is why the whole fake thing has to be stopped now, or at least
serious efforts made to reign it in. The fakes have already done
tremendous damage and we probably haven't seen the end of most of the
chains of destruction yet. Sellers of high-end posters are simply going
to have to bite the bullet, get with a couple of the recognized experts
in the field (we all know who they are) and arrange a viable "opinion of
authenticity" process which they can use in the future to reasonably
safely sell the very expensive type of posters in future.
Anyone who thinks this hobby-industry can go back to doing business with
the very expensive items the way it was done in the past with the same
kind of "of course it's authentic" attitude is kidding themselves.
Clearly the mere reputation of the seller isn't going to be enough anymore.
-- JR
Sean Linkenback wrote:
Hi Bruce,
someone just pointed out your latest club email to me and I read one
passage with a lot of interest:
"It seems that some of those who unknowingly sold some of these as
middlemen are taking the odd position that they have no liability in
this, and that they want the people they unknowingly cheated to join
them in lawsuits against those they obtained the fakes from, and that
they won't be refunding those they unknowingly cheated."
Do you have any actual firsthand knowledge of this happening? If so,
isn't this one of the things that should be "outed" so that people can
know do stay away from any middlemen who deny
responsibility/liability. You talked before about how disappointed
you were that people might be withholding this sort of information,
are you now doing the same?
And if anyone who is interested in this subject hasn't read Bruce's
new club message, I encourage you to do so, as it contains a nice
summary of many of the events.
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