Getty Image Demand For Image Removed Months Ago

[paulg]

I'm new to this forum, but wanted to post a story about a letter from Getty received today.  It demanded payment for images that were no longer on our website (for quite a few months).  They showed snippets of our web page, but not the whole page, which makes me think they were displaying an old cached page maintained on Yahoo! or some other search engine.  The fact is we removed all images of unknown source early this summer and replaced them all with images that were licensed from Dreamstime.com, long before Getty's demand.  All display images were properly licensed at the time of Getty's demand.  Does Getty have the right to such a payment?

[maccaz]

How long ago did you remove them? May possibly? I believe from reading other posts it can take up to 5 months for example, for the letter to arrive from GI from when they discover the 'infringement'. What kind of fee are they asking for?

It is possible they discovered them just before you took it down and you are only hearing now. Is it archived on Wayback Machine?

Anybody know of other archiving sites they use?

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

they also use domain tools, which is a pay service and you can't request removal, best you can do is block their robot from idexing your site in the future..

[Littlescoop]

Hi Buddhapi!  How specifically do you do block their robots, for those that are not very computer savvy?  I've also read one can enter code that in theory should block robots, but in reality they don't.  These robots just ignore them.   Have you heard this too?  I'll give it shot though if you, or someone on this forum, can give specific instructions (or guide someone where they can locate such instructions) as to how to enter the blocking code.

Also, I'm aware one can enter code so Google doesn't take screen shots, but does that in any way affect a company's ranking as far as how high up a company appears in Google search results?  I am not clear on that.   

[maccaz]

Has there been many cases of people getting a letter a long time after they have removed images from a website. Let's say they take them down maybe because of a website redesign, not because they got a letter, and were unaware they ever 'infringed'. But then a year later a letter arrives.

I know people have removed images and maybe up to 5 months later they receive a letter. But what about a year or 2 years? anybody know?

I have a feeling that they use archive.org and domaintools as way of seeing how long an image has been used for after they discover a 'live' image
on a website. I don't think they actually trawl through archives to find past infringers, but use it as a way find the length of time the image has been up and charge 'accordingly'.

Am i wrong in thinking this?

Thanks

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

I can't speak for the time frame issue, but I assume they are backlogged in sending the letters. And although, they still may have a case in some respects, I still think a judge would take into consideration that the image was removed prior to.

Once they find a site with an infringing image they do indded use archive.org and domain tools to look to see how long the image has been there, which is another reason to have archive.org remove your site, instructions for this can be found here: http://www.archive.org/about/exclude.php

very simple process, you can also direct domaintools from archiving your site as they respect robots.txt instruction, but the files they already have will remain... instruction for this can be found here: http://www.domaintools.com/webmasters/surveybot.php

specifically items "D" & "E"

and to prevent google from cacheing you page see this: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734&from=35306&rd=1

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

Hi Buddhapi!  How specifically do you do block their robots, for those that are not very computer savvy?  I've also read one can enter code that in theory should block robots, but in reality they don't.  These robots just ignore them.   Have you heard this too?  I'll give it shot though if you, or someone on this forum, can give specific instructions (or guide someone where they can locate such instructions) as to how to enter the blocking code.

Also, I'm aware one can enter code so Google doesn't take screen shots, but does that in any way affect a company's ranking as far as how high up a company appears in Google search results?  I am not clear on that.  

google's ,domaintools & archive.org bots/spiders do adhere to robots.txt, see the previous post for directions.

This will have no effect no your current rankings, as the pages will still be indexed, my main site still sits in the #1 position under multiple search terms.

In regards to GI /Picscout, this robot does not following robots.txt guidelines, and actually disguises itself as a regular user, I'm currently looking into whether there may be a legal issue here, my take on it is if I am giving specific instructions to block certain robots/spiders and they skirt these directions it's borderline hacking, not only are they in effect trespassing, they are also stealing my bandwidth and server resources. There are a few tricks that can aide in blocking picscout, if you are interested, please send me a PM, as this is not something i want to post openly.

[maccaz]

Thanks buddhapi

They definitely use the archive sites to find the exact time an image has been up, but I do feel they don't use
them to trawl and find past infringers. I think the 5 or so months time between catching and sendin the letter is
backlog, checking the archives, confirming domain owner etc.

Thanks a lot for the links. As usual this site is a great resource and the regular contributors efforts don't go unnoticed.

If anybody has received a letter more than 6 months after removing images due to redesign etc., it would be good
to hear from you. It might put a few minds to rest (mine included)

Thanks again

[BadLuck]

I would like to know this too.

I believe the biggest fear here is that they demand based purely on archived sites. I think most of us would rest easier to know that after X amount of days (since the removal of the offending images) you are then in the clear. I would hate to think that after the removal of the image(s)... 10 years down the road they can still send a demand letter based on an archive page. Or how about even within 2 years down the road so that it fall within the statue of limitations.

Any input here would be nice.

Thanks buddhapi

They definitely use the archive sites to find the exact time an image has been up, but I do feel they don't use
them to trawl and find past infringers. I think the 5 or so months time between catching and sendin the letter is
backlog, checking the archives, confirming domain owner etc.

Thanks a lot for the links. As usual this site is a great resource and the regular contributors efforts don't go unnoticed.

If anybody has received a letter more than 6 months after removing images due to redesign etc., it would be good
to hear from you. It might put a few minds to rest (mine included)

Thanks again

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

My belief is that they use picscout to crawl sites for images, well the alert goes off they found one (or more) on your site, they grab a screen shot, then proceed to use archive.org or domaintools to establish how long the image has been present. I don't think they are are going this sites in search of images, that would be too labor intensive..

[Oscar Michelen]

It is difficult to clear all of the archived versions of your website tho BuddhaPi and other posts on this forum delineate how  to bets do so. Domain Tools has been the new sticking point here because Getty has definitely been using them to locate their images as well. There may be a good argument as to whether an archived version of your site is a "use" of the images.   

[BadLuck]

The only use of the archive image at this point would be for them to sue. So if the PicScout bot scans a site today and finds out that 3 years ago (the archived version of) the site had multiple pictures of a stock photo company, could they still claim/sue if the current site doesn't have the images anymore? It's past the 3 years, but the murky part about all of this is that they could claim based on an archive snapshot that the infringement started on the day that they found it. What makes this unfair is that 10 years from now, they can scan every archived image of a site and make a claim based on that even if the image is long gone.

It would be easier to relax about these cases if we knew that these claims are being made based on the current site's state, not how it once was there. If people right their wrongs, they should be able to relax from that point forward, instead of living in "fear" that their once mistake will come back.
 

It is difficult to clear all of the archived versions of your website tho BuddhaPi and other posts on this forum delineate how  to bets do so. Domain Tools has been the new sticking point here because Getty has definitely been using them to locate their images as well. There may be a good argument as to whether an archived version of your site is a "use" of the images.