Just check out Picscout claims that it trawled the ‘net in 2005 (I think) and found loads of what it decided was infringements and took screen shots. If it claims screenshots are not infringements then we all know what to do don’t we?

So up until Getty bought Picscout in April 2011 then surely copyright was flagrantly broken by both parties, as they absolutely know the law (or so they say) on copyright. And they do it thousands of times every day/hour/second. Two wrongs do not make a right and just because you infringed their rights does not give them the right to infringe yours.

In the UK there is no defence to copyright infringement (as Getty will all too happily tell you) so they are as guilty as anyone else with no defence.

If you check Getty’s T&Cs etc they say things like:

Their procedures are designed to get people to change from infringers to customers (tosh, it makes people non-customers for life!)

If you think they have broken your copyright they say please let them know, not please send us an obnoxious demand with an invoice to make us pay up.

It is also against their T&Cs to ‘data-mine’ their site, which is exactly what they do to the rest of the web on the off-chance.

If you run a site it might be an idea to update your T&Cs to make it a breach for others to datamine your site.

And there are ways to ‘trap’ bots that ignore robots.txt instructions (which Picscout does I’m led to believe).

I’m against copyright infringement, but that means by everybody, including Picscout and those that use and pay for it. Copyright law is not there to be ignored by some just because they think they are ‘right’. The law is quite clear there as far as this layman is concerned.

Unless someone else knows differently.