Image deleted well before receiving Getty Letter

[phxsunbum]

I download an image from a site that offered royalty free images and included it in a site for my client to review.  The image was on our server but never published to the world, however I assume it was searchable via google until the final product was released and the link published.

After reading about the Getty Letter on other forums I found out about ImageExchange that can be used to identify rights protected images.  To be safe I immediately began checking all the sites I produced and found the image referenced was actually owned by Getty.  On July 14, 2011 at 2:36pm the entire site was removed from our servers as a result of this self-discovery.

On September 8, 2011, almost 2 months later, my client received a letter from Getty demanding payment of $760 to "settle" this matter.

I believe I was proactive and did my due-diligence and as a result of self-discovery removed the image rather than wait for it to be discovered.  I believe this is a valid defense.  Any thoughts from anyone else?

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

I would agree, hence the problem with archive.org and other sites that cache pages, there always seems to be a trail..