copyright concern

studio54

Hi all

Apologies if this is the wrong section.
Just wondering if someone could advise. A friend of mine set up a website for my business a couple of years ago and the results were extremely pleasing to me. At this point I would like to stress that I personally have no training or knowledge of how to build/launch a website.
Anyway I have now recieved a letter from a london based firm informing me that an image being used on my website requires a license at a cost of £1200stg even if the image is removed.
Should I remove image and ignore their demand for compensation or is this more serious?
All constructive advice is appreciated

cheers
B

ressem

Getty / Corbis Images? They have bots that browse the internet for these images, and those images that are digitally edited versions of the original.

I'd suggest removing the questionable image. Keep a note of the resolution and picture information of the image as used on the site.
Check that the image that they are claiming to be the sole licensor of is the same as the image in question. (This is probably included with the letter)
Contact your friend the web developer to see whether he licensed the image or sourced it from another provider?

There's also the possibility that the London based firm isn't legit, so worth checking that.

You shouldn't take legal advise from anyone on this forum though, so we can't say to ignore it.

Perhaps we can say whether they have ever had debt collectors visiting after remedying their website.

There's plenty of sites such as
http://www.extortionletterinfo.com/my-case/
which describe how the process went for them, and the demands that company made of Getty to prove that Getty had sole rights to license the image.
In this case, as they disputed the claim, the settlement figure dropped from $1300 to $500. And you can read how it ended for them.

jor199

My wife had this problem a few years ago.She got a letter from Getty images saying she had used an image on her website that they had copyright over . It was a tiny part image of what they said they owned. We didn't pay them anything she sent them back a letter / email stating that she was unaware of the copyright on the image and had removed it from the website once she was made aware of the copyright. To date we have not got any reply back or had any correspondence from Getty Images since the original letter in January 2008.

woggy2006

Hi Studio54, Just wondered if you had any solution to this, having similar problems over a photo that web designer put on website, Getty are demanding 1500

Sparks

Boards has a rather strict site-wide rule on giving legal advice (which looks like what's needed here), and there's not really much in the way of development to this question either, so closing this.