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Here is an email my brother sent to me regarding IStock. Not sure of the source, but thought I would share this with you and you may want to consider going another direction for photos. Has anyone else heard of this?

 

Brian

 

 

Do not conduct business with Getty Images or any of its surrogates, such as iStockPhoto.com, because this kind of abuse should not be rewarded. If you have received a “settlement letter” from these scumbags, you can probably ignore it. I would recommend (A) removing the alleged infringing images anyway, (B) removing all copies of your site from archive.org’s Wayback Machine, and © waiting for Google’s cache of your website to refresh or vanish, before you initiate contact with Getty Images again, if you do so at all. You can also add entries to your robots.txt file to disallow the Internet Archive’s bot from caching up and archiving your site, and you can add META tags to each page that disallow ALL caching by robots; this will effectively reduce the chance that some third party can verify that the images ever existed, and give you plausible deniability: “I’m sorry, but no such image exists or has ever existed on this website. You did an excellent job of mocking up a screenshot, though; we appreciate your need to locate customers, but you are in error and we do not wish to license images from you if you choose to approach us this way.”

 

Apparently, Corbis Images is doing the same exact thing. Avoid them as well. In fact, search for ANY stock photo company you do business with followed by the word “letter” and see if they’re actively threatening people before you pay them one red cent. Do your part to discourage bad business practices and we may very well see this kind of crap end one day.

 

In my case, I am considering this matter closed. I am also doing everything within my power to steer people away from using getty and istockphoto.com (wholey owned by getty). Ironically, I had been using istockphoto prior to this whole rediculous ordeal. Not surprisingly, I have since stopped.

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Unless the terms & conditions and copyright have changed, I think the only way that anyone can file suit (or settlement) is if you use the image as a business logo or icon.

 

I believe there is also limited use for advertising materials, videos, brochures, etc.

 

But like Stef said, we really can't form an opinion without knowing the full details behind that email.

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Ok - here is the reply my brother sent to me. I guess apparently the geniuses who built his marina's previous site did not purchase the license. I am not surprised - by doing the re design for them - as a beginner - I found many mistakes and careless thoughts behind the scenes of the previous work provided by these guys (previous designers / developers) - here is my brothers reply on this:

 

It wasnt an email. they sent a letter to the marina asking for like 875.00 due to using their image without a license from a pic on the old site. They have a company from Israel that they hire to scour the internet looking for this stuff. Basically they set certain points on an image kinda like a fingerprint then let the bot go though the internet looking for anything that will match it. In the case of our pic. The right side was cut and put on the left, the left cut and put on the right (pic of palm trees on a beach). The parent company of istockphoto (Getty images) is the ones that are doing this. It looks like they go around buying up everything they can and acquiring the rights to the images at the same time then hammer your ass with the threat of a lawsuit. So far they haven't taken anyone to court. They're kinda going the route of the RIAA, but with pics instead of music. Most people are just calling it a scam since they just want the money from you.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images (read bottom part about copyright or who've they bought right above that)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=oyJ&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=getty+images+letter&aq=f&aqi=g2&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=WJz&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=getty+images+letter+scam&aq=0&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=getty+images+letter+sc&gs_rfai=

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As with anything you purchase, be sure to keep a copy of your transaction so you can verify to the author that you did obtain the rights to use the image(s) per the terms and conditions of the site you purchased it from.

 

And you might as well print a copy of the terms and attach it to your transaction because sometimes terms can change over time.

Edited by newseed
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Ben - absolutely. On my 1st (and only project so far - which will be re designed soon to add better aesthetics) I only used 2 images from Stock Exchange (SXC) and received permission from the owner to use. I will always follow proper protocol as I do not want to step on any toes and want to make sure I as a designer / developer be true to the community

 

Newseed - thanks for the information. I have kept the email from the owner of the images stating I can use them

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