Recently, a client of mine who shall remain anonymous received a nasty letter from Getty Images, claiming copyright infringement and demanding an immediate “settlement amount” for images they claimed my client was using on their website without a license. The client had the website designed by an Indian firm many years ago and the content of the site was (obviously) represented to him as being completely OK.
My client, if in fact engaged in copyright infringement at all, was not willingly and intentionally doing so. The images were kind of stupid in my not-so-humble opinion anyway, and being the inheritor of the site’s maintenance tasks (or lack thereof, since nothing’s been changed beyond link targets), I removed the potentially infringing images, despite the fact that the threatening letter forwarded to me for review contains no actual proof of copyright.
The content of this letter is malicious, to say the least, and attempts to deceive the recipient into ignoring their legal rights. Furthermore, the letter asks for an outrageous “settlement” to the tune of $1,000 PER IMAGE…for images that aren’t even 300 dots across! I can’t imagine why anyone would pay fifty cents a pixel for ANY image. (Unless it’s porn, because you’d be shocked at just how many people look at the stuff and wreck their computer in the process by executing something claiming to be, say, a “Scarlett Johansson private porn movie” when it’s really a virus. Sheesh.)
I started searching for info on these people after this event occurred, and that’s when the really interesting tidbits started popping up…
A Google search for “getty images letter” yields ~856,000 results. They’ve been damned busy. Most of it is forum postings, but the real gem was this website that says it all, and I’ll leave you with a delicious excerpt from it:
Why is This Being Called “Legalized Extortion” and an “Extortion Letter Scheme”?
This is a descriptive term for Getty Images’ deliberate, malicious, bullying, and presumptuous letter campaign that engages in what is tantamount to legalized extortion. The letter in its entirety is both well-worded and well-constructed. It has been clearly been well thought out. Because of the deliberate construction and planning that goes into this letter campaign, it qualifes as a Scheme.
The Letter automatically presumes guilt of the recipient. The letter recipient is expected to provide proof of their innocence. In effect, the letter recipient is presumed guilty unless they prove their innocence.
Although the letter does provide for the possibility that the letter recipient was unaware and unintended of the alleged infringement, the Letter takes a heavy-handed and unforgiving approach of stating that they are responsible for all alleged “damages and liability”. The Letter automatically presumes Getty Images has been “damaged” whether or not that is actually true or proven.
Because this scheme relies heavily on the letter recipients ignorance of due legal process and people’s inherent fear of legal conflict as a result of that ignorance, it is considered by many as legal extortion.
That’s all, folks. On that site, you can find a lawyer who will represent you for $150 an hour against Getty Images, should you receive a nasty letter from them and feel the need to respond. Note that Getty Images has not filed one single lawsuit against ANY recipients of their extortion letter. This is no different than the RIAA extortion scheme attempting to sue “file sharers” even though no proof of actual sharing (and thus no damages) exist.
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 (C) 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.”
Normally I’m against copyright infringement, but the presumption of intentional malicious infringement and including a settlement bill is insanely unethical and does indeed amount to “legalized extortion.” If a third party misrepresented the licensing status of the delivered product to the site’s owner, how is that the site owner’s fault in any way? Such a situation would be similar to claiming that a publisher is engaged in copyright infringement for publishing a book: they’re making money off of it and distributing the material, so isn’t it their fault? NO. The CONTENT GENERATOR is at fault for misrepresenting the facts to the next link in the chain, and the content generator should be held responsible for their failure to comply with copyright laws.
Beyond that, though, this is a decency issue when it all boils down. It’s always possible that the infringing party is not doing so intentionally and does not know that the image is licensed; indeed, on the Internet, much content is reproduced without copyright statements attached, and it’s easy to err. A POLITE cease and desist request would have been more than sufficient to stem the infringement for good and cause the business owner to “wise up.” Instead, these jerks chose to bully up my client, and that’s flat-out stupid, because someone like myself sees this stuff as a third party and blogs about it, generating NEGATIVE PUBLICITY. I wish I could give them MORE bad publicity for trying to screw my client out of egregious sums of money that just so happen to be less than the cost of a lawsuit, but far more than the license value of the images. They do not deserve to be in business if this is their idea of B2B relations. Interestingly enough, they only seem to go for small business owners, not big ones that can fight back! I can’t explain how despicable Getty Images is for behaving like this, and I strongly urge you to never give them a cent again.
On a side note, this is why you should choose a reputable United States-based firm to design websites instead of outsourcing that work to India or other countries that are known for their rampant copyright violations. My client almost got bitten by something he did before meeting me–make sure you don’t fall into the same trap. Get either licenses for the images or a statement from the designer that all material on the site they’ve designed is properly licensed for your site or is an original work that they have the rights to license to you directly. Prevention is important, and copyright infringement IS generally a bad thing, so take the proper steps and avoid this issue entirely.
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.
An excellent resource to read letters like these is the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.
10 Comments
Hi! Any further information on this would be much appreciated. I received a letter like this and, although not a lawyer, am in general concurrence that a cease and desist WITHOUT dermand for payment or “settlement” would be a more acceptable approach. Please let me know if ou know of any cases at all related to this. AWV2008@YAHOO. Thank you!
A client of mine also recieved this letter today. It is plain extortion from a company that clearly does not care about retaining or adding new customers. I say don’t pay but remove the images that you didn’t know were theirs. To Getty Images, good luck taking millions of small business owners into court to deemed guilty until proven innocent…oh wait our justice system works the other way around…sorry getty.
Hi All!
I just got my second letter Getty responding to my first letter for a picture infringement.
Let me know if anyone is doing a class action or has any advice.
In the second letter they went form wanting $1300 to a $1000, I wonder if I write another letter if I can get them down to $700 or less =)
I have every intentions of fight this to the end!
I’m not going to pay and will join a class action.
Thanks very much for the info and advice. I’m in the midst of dealing with Getty. They have now turned me over to NCS Recovery, probably because I answered their letter and made an offer to settle for the posted purchase price of $263 – still an outrageous amount for a postage size image they cannot prove wasn’t obtained legally. On a separate note for the owner of this website, thought you would want to know that Google Ads has posted a Getty Images ad on your website with a link to Getty.com!
I am in Italy, and I received a letter for 3 images, asking around 500 euros in total + a 50% penalty. Interestingly, their copy and paste system didn’t work well, so they added a 500 euros penalty instead of 250. I wrote back saying I was happy to pay them 750 euros with the correct 50% penalty, and got an answer saying that I still had to pay them 1000 euros. They stated that the prices for the pictures on their site are not valid in case of violation of copyright, so they sent me some new prices that they completely made up for the occasion. I refused to pay, and they are now saying they will take me to court asking at least 1000 euros per picture. I don’t understand, do this people believe they sell gold or what? And do they really think that there would be a judge awarding them a completely invented price, that doesn’t even exist on their web site?
Thanks for putting this blog together. In 2003, I was one of the unsuspecting consumers of web design services who was (admittedly) naïve when it came to copyright and images.
Finding out the hard way, I came to learn that two of the images on my site had not been paid for and were apparently Getty Images. The letters immediately started flowing and I immediately wrote back, informing them that I had since taken the images down, offering an apology for the misunderstanding, and suggesting that they make available the very technology that “caught” me and others using their images illegally, so that we can all make sure that we don’t do it in the future.
Of course, no consideration was offered for my letter, my corrective action, nor the suggestion that I made. Instead, more threatening letters ensued…
Then, I was handed over to NCS Recovery. They immediately started with the threatening calls. For a while, I didn’t answer the phone. Then, one day, I picked up the phone and politely asked them to stop calling me. I explained that I know that as a collections agency they have to respect my request to stop calling me. And guess what? Not only have I not had a call since (4-5 months now), but there has been no follow-up whatsoever.
I am not an attorney, and I can’t be 100% certain (I don’t think that even attorney’s in this field can be), but once it is handed over to a collection’s agency, I am pretty sure that it isn’t going to go anywhere. Collections agencies rarely take people to court. And if they do, it has to be for a big sum of money and the case has got to be a slam dunk (which would make you think that if the case was a slam dunk, it would never have been handed over to the collections agency in the first place). Collections agencies try to scare people into paying, but their bark is rarely ever backed up with a bite.
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.
I cannot think of a more stupid, bird-brained idea as to play hard ball with (inevitably) some of the people that are your actual customers. Biting the hand that feeds them is an understatement.
I wish you folks the best of luck. I believe that most of you did not intend to steal anything and that this undoubtedly just caused you more stress at a time when (economically) you could have easily done without it.
I wish getty images much grief for their selfish, cowardly act. And may this grief come in the form of missed business opportunities, increased expenses, and (hopefully) an ultimate demise of the company and the positions held by the greedy executives who made these cowardly decisions to extort well-meaning individuals.
Add one more voice to this outrage. I got the same letter. As with the OP, this was the work of my web developer, but, in any case, there was no digital or visible watermark and nothing in the image properties to indicate that it was a Getty image. Am I supposed to check their site to see if the image is one of theirs? Give me a break. So much for acting in the interests of their clients. I filed a BBB complaint and got a “tough shit” response from their lawyers and a threat to sue. I offered to pay them a portion of the 1,000 they demanded. We’ll see what the response is. This is utter idiocy. All they had to do is ask nicely and invite me to purchase images from their site. They might actually have earned a customer. Now all they’ve earned is my enmity and disgust.
I have set up an e-mail account GetGettyImages@gmail.com for anyone interested in joining me in a Class Action lawsuit against Getty Image’s demand letters/email messages/phone calls. My company appears to be unique in that the Sales Person for Getty Images demanded $10,000 for past use of an image (which, by the way we purchased) on our website, several thousand dollars more for print ads, several thousand dollars for marketing material, and an unknown amount for damages. We were informed that we would be receiving two separate invoices from them. I will post again when we receive the actual invoices.
Found this posting after I too rec’d a letter, and doing a little research on-line. In my case, I believe some web design work done several years ago utilized some royalty free images from a company which Getty has since purchased. However, rather than waste any of my time or energy responding or trying to explain any of this, I have merely removed the suspect images from the website. It is quite unlikely they will pursue more than a handful of these cases in court (much like the earlier comparison to RIAA with song downloading), however, as a software developer myself, I do have to say that I see the legal basis (and in fact duty) that Getty has to protect their copyright claims. Much like a pair of knock-off Nikes or boot-leg DVD’s, if they DID NOT send the nasty letters whenever a violation was encountered, it would be impossible to defend their copyright ownership at all. (It’s like the old story of the Coke reps that order “coke” in a restaurant, and if they are served “Pepsi” instead, they have to sue the restaurant owner to protect the “Coke” copyright).
Don’t take it personally; just remove the images if you don’t have a valid license to use them; keep a low profile, and try to fly under their radar (IOW, I wouldn’t even respond to any phone calls or letters), and hope it goes away (the old “Cheers” character Sam Malone’s philosophy; ignore a problem long enough and it goes away) FYI, NCS Recovery is one of the largest “letter writing” collection agencies; they really don’t do much more than that, and no, they’re not going to sue you for a couple thousand dollars.