You have a website? - Beware of Getty Images

[gonelong]

If you have a website with images on it, do yourself a favor and ask yourself two questions.
1) Are all the images on the site taken by yourself?
2) If no to 1, are your certain your images are properly licensed? Do you have proof?

If you have proof, you may want to google Getty and the place you purchased them from to see if you find any mention of "The Getty Letter".

I purchased a subscription to a web template store some time ago. I generally utilized the templates as a a starting point, and one a few occasions, utilized the imagery in those templates for sites I designed for clients.

Today one of my clients received an invoice for $750 from Getty images claiming copyright infringement on a single (one!) image displayed on their site. A quick Google of Getty Image shows this to be a real problem for smaller business and web designers. $750 is right in the sweet spot of too big to ignore their scare tactics, and to little to hire a lawyer to fight it.

It's basically a shakedown IMO. I have purchased image licenses from several places, but I didn't realize (stupidly) the images in templates being sold would not likely be legally licensed. I guess I never really thought about it, but looking back it's not difficult to see this is probably the case.

It sure feels to me that Getty allows template stores to display the images, knowing the larger percentage of people that buy them will not consider that the images in the template are not part of the license.

As far as I know, nobody offers a service to determine if an images is copyrighted or not. So basically, if you didn't take the picture, you are probably opening yourself up to this risk.

I have removed the image from the website and will be asking archive.org and google cache to remove the image as well. Now I'll likely begin a long process to come to some sort of settlement with Getty, though it sounds like they play hardball.

I surely didn't intend to use copyrighted images, so I want to warn you of the possible dangers. Getty makes it very clear they don't care about intent, pay up.

If you have any experience with Getty, please PM me.

GL

[Redsfaithful]

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc etc

I would say ignore it until they sue, but I guess that's problematic since this is a client you're dealing with, and I doubt they will like that answer. I've gotten letters from Getty before (amongst others), and in my experience since you've taken the image down, it's not going to go any further. It's not worth their time to take you to court for $750 over an image you've removed.

But like I said, I know a client might not want to hear that, so I don't have advice for you there, but as far as them actually going to court I don't see that happening, and has never happened to me in similar situations.

[gonelong]

Thanks for the advice, I am thinking over how I want to handle this.

Their MO is to turn it over to a collections agency which then hounds your client non-stop. It is not a debt, it is an unresolved dispute.

From what I can gather, this is a pretty good source of revenue for them, and they are getting better at scaring the snot out of people.

Legally, they have a point. However, their tactics are brutal, and their monetary request amounts to extortion. I'd pay them something to just get it off my radar, however, I suspect they'd see an offer as a sign of weakness and ratchet up the pressure hoping to get the requested amount.

I posted this as I was totally unaware and suspect other may be as well. I have 2 guys I work with (at my day job) that are removing a handful of images they are using that came from templates. Better to be safe than sorry.

GL