I am a retired teacher and I tutor grade school and high school students in my retirement years. I maintain a webpage for my students through the Vistaprint Company. On February 16, 2017 I received in the mail what at first I thought was “junk mail” with a return address from the Getty Images Company in Seattle, Washington, but when I read it, I saw that had an old photo capture from about a year ago of the webpage I had first made. This page was no longer in operation. They had singled out one small photo and claimed the photo belonged to them and I was in violation of their copyright. I became very concerned and contacted them at their email address. I told them 1.) The page no longer appears. 2.) I received all my images from Vistaprint’s image gallery – the gallery that Vistaprint makes available when you subscribe to its web services. I received back an email stating that I owed GettyImages $815.00 for the use of the image. This amount seemed unusually high for an unremarkable generic image of the back of a public speaker, so I investigated their site and found that hundreds of similar images were for sale for anywhere from $12 to $33 per image. I replied with a polite letter offering a settlement of $20 based on their costs. The company told me that they would “make this all go away” if I bought one of their annual subscriptions at a cost of around $1000. My other choice was to pay the $815 or they would sue me. They declined my offer.
I am aware that one can only ask the “fair market” price of anything and I asked why they would seem to think that this one image was worth 1000 times more than other similar images. They did not explain their reasoning only that they owned the image and that’s what they charge.
I began to think that this sounded like an extortion racket. Should I pay them or wait to see what happens? This is very distressing!
I am aware that one can only ask the “fair market” price of anything and I asked why they would seem to think that this one image was worth 1000 times more than other similar images. They did not explain their reasoning only that they owned the image and that’s what they charge.
I began to think that this sounded like an extortion racket. Should I pay them or wait to see what happens? This is very distressing!