Getty Images Suing Website Owners
If I didn’t see the correspondence myself, I probably would not have believed it. Yes, Getty Images is suing website owners for using their images supposedly without paying for the rights. They have a software that crawls webpages, using an algorithm it can detect Getty images even if they have been cropped, or otherwise slightly altered. The images need not have the Getty watermark to be detected. That’s fine so they find people using their images and then send them a cease and desist letter, right? No they are demanding upwards of 20 times the original image price, threatening legal action. For this reason I will never use Getty Images and will continue to use iStockPhoto.
Here is an interesting website devoted to the topic: Getty Extortion Letter
Yea… same problem for us. We have several different business sites, some of which had skins bought for our CMS, and still get notices. For our custom designs, we got some images off google images. Its crazy they are doing that. funny to do it in times where times are hard. I’ll never use them again also.
Sorry to drop this bomb on you, but istock is owned by Getty…
Yes, Getty owns istock and MANY others.. good luck finding one that doesn’t coincide with their antics.
The best thing to do is record where you have got each and every image on your website from. If you get sued for breach of copyright you need to be able to indicated the ligitimate source of the image.
Haha, Brad, I just wanted to tell you you’re awesome brother. I’m a young banker from Chicago who appreciates the fundamental application of fairness. I RANDOMLY came across http://www.bradino.com (names Brady, friends nicknamed me Bradino), read your opener, read the above article, and thought to myself, “What a cool a$$ dude.”
I don’t use tweeter, but wanted to share a message of encouragement nonetheless. Keep on doing what your doing. Solid work.
- Brady Grooters
P.S. Being you’re somewhat of a computer guru, I was surprised how difficult it was to contact you on your website! Just some friendly constructive criticism. Unless of course it’s on purpose.. If that’s the case just go ahead and void out this “P.S” section for me, haha.
I put this on the Getty Images discussion site on flickr
The alternative picture: dare you call it a scam?
…and a sa photographer you get 5 bucks a photo? Are you really happy with that? Are you happy that a photo library could be charging more like 100 times that for the same photo?
Picture this. You have a small business, just you and your wife, making meat and potatoe pies. Everyone tells you you need a website. You haven’t the means or skills to set one up yourself so you ask a friend who is a web developer if he’ll help you out. He’s got loads of his own photos but hasn’t got one of a hot, steaming pie so for a bit of conviction material he adds three tiny images off a disc that was sent free to him by a photo library. There it is, a website with three two inch square pictures of nice juicy, flavoursome pies and we’re happy knowing that no one will bang on at us not having a website.
My wife and I get back to making meat and potatoe pies. One day two letters arrive through the letter box addressed to our Legal Department. Well my wife and I haven’t got a ‘Legal Department’, but we opened the letter with some trepidation. Suddenly we find we are being threatened by a mega large photo library with court action unless we pay over 600 bucks per image, a total of over 1800 bucks. We’re mortified. No cease and desist: just you MUST pay. We blame the web developer, but it transpires we are liable because it is our site. How did the photo library know that our site with a total of just 27 hits even featured their images?
It turns out that they know because they have digitally encoded every photo that was on that free disc sent to web designers, which enables the library to monitor and trace the use of each image anywhere on the worldwide internet..
You don’t suppose that this is a deliberate ploy do you? Do you think they pay peanuts to the photographers, and then deliberately supply their images free to web developers, knowing they will innocently put them on punters websites, knowing that the punters are responsible for its content, knowing they can locate any image anywhere on the internet, and then use search engines to ‘hack’ into websites worldwide to pinpoint and identify a user of an image and then use massive threat to extort large amounts of money from ‘innocent’ punters???
Because that might seem the reason why one photo library is keen to have your photos for a pittance: they won’t make much money out of selling your photo, but they will make a fortune out of forcing those who did not even place a photo on their website to cough up large amounts to pay for their apparent “costs”. If the price they pay you is 5 bucks, what is the other 595 dollars or so they charge for ???
Are you happy to be associated with an organisation that is so calculating in the pittance it pays out to its photographers whilst extorting a fortune from those small to medium businesses it specifically targets who fall into its devious trap?