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Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: FWIW: Oddball question / thought ... not sure if it's been discussed here

« on: December 02, 2014, 05:51:57 PM »

@Dreamer:  Ahh, no. Sorry, I should clarify that: I received my first *set of letters and harassment calls* from their extortion machine years ago. It didn't go to trial.  In that one... via a very bizarre (long story) way, a graphic of their made it onto a deeply-buried page on my company site that only a bot would ever find (but of course Getty's bots crawl every nook & cranny), so... Anyway, I nearly settled for like $800 (and had used only a tiny portion of a guy's head from a larger pic they owned), but my boss said, "F*ck them" and instructed me to ignore them. I fugured it was his ass on the line, so I did ... and it went away.

@ Greg:  Thanks. Yeah, that sounds about right to me as well. I'll be reading up on that one, for sure. I suspect part of their strategy in pricing their images at like $500 (when similar ones routinely cost about $1 - $5 online everywhere else) must be an attempt at un-trivializing these things.

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Getty Images Letter Forum / FWIW: Oddball question / thought ... not sure if it's been discussed here

« on: December 02, 2014, 03:46:00 PM »

Hi all-  I'm a newbie to this forum, but wanted to post something that I feel (after browsing the forum and finding a TON of great info about defending oneself from these jerks -- thank you all so much!) may be worth considering...

The image Getty sued me for is one that is widely available in print on posters. People hang posters all over the place, in public and in private and, as far as I know (I'm not a lawyer, though), if a poster is hanging somewhere in the real world, there isn't any kind of law that says you can't take a picture of it, for whatever purpose. So, let's say that my friend Bob has one such poster in his home, and he's standing there next to it, and I take his photo. Then, on my business' blog, I post the photo in high-res... maybe I even crop it and just show the poster w/ a note like "Hey, look at this cool poster that was hanging in Bob's home office."

I'm not sure what I'm asking here... it just seems to me that, if you license images to people who are making posters out of them for public display, then that ought to factor into things somehow here. Of course, this is merely one additional thing that, if it came to a trial, I would likely work into a defense. I'm just not sure how.  But, I did want to at least mention it here in case others haven't yet, as I'm happy to contribute any type of defense-style thinking possible against these criminals. Thankfully, they're only suing me for one lonely image. So, I'm ignoring them, and will continue to follow advice I've seen here. 

ps Just for the record, I've been sued by these idiots before and actually go to great lengths to avoid using their imagery online. I've been buying images from much better places for years. The story above is just one example of how one can rather innocently fall within their greedy sights.