A.D. Coleman comments on the NYT article at Photocritic International.
Vogel gets one substantial fact dead wrong when she writes, “To pay off creditors, a bankruptcy court in Minnesota is forcing Polaroid to sell a portion of its collection at Sotheby’s in New York on June 21 and 22.” The Minnesota Bankruptcy Court is definitely not “forcing Polaroid to sell a portion of its collection at Sotheby’s.” The Minnesota Bankruptcy Court has merely endorsed the debtors’ fervent plea to allow this sale to go forward; it didn’t require it of them. In short, the current holders of the collection initiated this sale, not the court; the fact that this will happen under a ruling known generically as a court order should not get interpreted as the court requiring reluctant parties to conduct a fire sale. In this case, the sellers can’t wait to get rid of the stuff, in which they have no interest outside of its cash value.
It’s also important to point out that the entity selling off the collection is neither the original Polaroid Corporation nor the company now marketing products under the Polaroid brand name. It’s PBE Corporation, formerly known as Polaroid Corporation, a segment of the husk of Petters Group Worldwide, which got dismantled as a result of the collapse of a Ponzi scheme that operated under the name Petters International. (Petters has now been tried and convicted for that crime.) I know this gets arcane, but as journalists we need to exercise great precision in using the name Polaroid to identify a legal entity at this juncture, given that it applies to two now-defunct corporations and can also get construed as referring to the current holders of that brand name. In point of fact, no extant legal entity now goes by the name Polaroid Corporation.
Read the whole thing.
