My brother-in-law just called me on the phone in a panic. He was messing around with building a website and was considering trying to start a business with it. In building his simple site, he pulled some images off of the web using Google Images and stuck them in a few places as place fillers. He then showed his site to a couple of people, including me, and then decided to drop the idea. His website has been sitting around dormant for almost a year. Just today he tells me that he got a letter from a company called getty images demanding that he owes them $1250 for use of one of the one of the pictures that he pulled off of a website he found through Google Images. Nobody is sure exactly how the people found their image and found his website since it was not marketed in any way. They obviously got his address from a "who is" search of his domain name. They didn't seem to actually know his name because they addressed it to the domain name of his website and put his address on it. It all seems a little fishy to me. Needless to say, he just deleted all pictures from his site, since none of them actually belonged to him. Now he is having panic attacks. Does anyone out there have any experience with this sort of thing? Any insight?
On a semi-related topic, there is one particular newpaper in Nevada that sues websites such as forums and blogs for copyright infringement when part of one of it's articles is cut/pasted onto another site. Even if the lawsuits turn out to have little to no merit, the legal fees aren't something the average blogger or forum owner wants to deal with.
Michael, Insight: Image use permissions : Copyright - Web Search Help U.S. Copyright Office - Fair Use United States Code: Title 17,504. Remedies for infringement: Damages and profits | LII / Legal Information Institute Getty Images - Unsupported browser detected My advice is to consult with an attorney. As an aside you have now linked G***** I***** to this site, a Google or other search and your name.
This site has links to several resources for individuals who have received settlement demand letters from Getty Images.
Very good info. It smelled like some sort of trap to me. That website was very helpful, thanks so much. Now I have got to make a call and make a relative very happy and relieved! Thanks again!
At the website that GeneralSnus pointed me to, I learned that this is a racket that this company engages in. They post nice pictures and make them easy to get onto your personal site, they make it so it's not readily apparent that you will owe money and then they use 'bots to find the images again and generate threatening letters demanding huge sums of money. Apparently, it works often enough to be worth the effort. According to that site, in the US, the most they can do is send you a "cease and desist" order, if I understand it correctly, they can't force you to pay unless you refuse to remove the image. Somebody look over the site and tell me what you think. http://www.zyra.info/getstu.htm
Yeah I would take down the photo (which it sounds like he's already done) and reply to the email informing them that the photo has been removed. Hopefully that'll be the end of it. For a relatively small amount it doesn't seem likely that they'll actually be willing to pay the money to collect it.
If anyone is interested in using the photos of others, you may want to check out the Creative Commons. -Matt
Getty is a large stock image house, and apparently they are pretty aggressive with theft of their images. It's likely their images are invisibly watermarked with the Digimarc technology. If so, they can simply sign up for Digimarc's spider service, which constantly crawls the web, looking for stolen images. However, generally speaking, if you remove the image promptly upon receiving notice of infringement, there isn't much they can do. There is a statutory fine for copyright theft, which is large ($25,000 per image) but it is very rarely enforced.
Yes, this is my understanding too; I'm glad that people I respect can confirm this fact. My bro-in-law removed the image even before he called me in a panic.