After looking at the condition of the negatives I wouldn't lose sleep over it. IMO they will need the higher resolution and several images to do much. As a perk the museum gets some free advertising by making it known the images are available for a price.
Yes, I'm a Researcher and I have the higher resolution images, and even in those, things don't automatically pop out. That plane was flying pretty high - these are not closeups.
The advantage of several images of the same area, of course, is you can eliminate photo flaws - if something appears in more than one shot in the same place, it's not a photo flaw. Just a couple months ago we were fantasizing about Earhart and Noonan building the "Arrow" signal for aerial searchers, but it doesn't appear in any of the new images - it was a ghost. Such is the danger in working with just one image.
It dawned on me while looking at the hi-res photos, that it would be nice if it were possible to overlay the official map grid on each image, so as to more easily identify the locations of anomalies, but since these are all obliques at an unknown (precisely) altitude and angle, that would be one heck of a math job.
I don't normally question people's ethics, but it just didn't seem straightforward to me. I'm probably just missing something, and 'taint my business anyway. I just pictured a bunch of other people doing the same thing just to get the free contact sheets and overwhelming Matt, none of them intending to ever actually purchase copies. But it might be in Matt's interest to make the contact sheets available online somewhere just so people would be encouraged to purchase copies. The contact sheets would be
really low-res and useful only for choosing which pics to order.
It would help the museum if they did sell some copies. Like people could buy just one or two or three shots and not spend a lot, and still have pretty good copies. They are lower res, but they are big enough to work with. Good enough for the casual poker-arounder. Then if they want to get more serious, the Researcher package is the same cost as just a handful of pictures, and you get all 47 images in hi-res plus all the other advantages of being a Tighar Researcher. Sounds like a win-win to me.