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Here is the scenario:





I built a basic website for a small to medium sized company here
in Little Rock Arkansas over four years ago where I did all the
photography and design work. The photography included shooting all
their items in their inventory plus exterior shots of the building,
trucks and their products out in the field. When I built the website
I made a simple directions page that had a map that linked to yahoo
maps plus I added two thumbnail images of simple road signs to add to the fact that this was a directions page. I
ended up coping two straight forward road sign images from yahoo images. Both of these images where sized at approx
180 pixel x 70 pixel and where at a strange 96dpi for the web.


Just a few days ago this company received a letter from Getty Images. Getty Images is
claiming that one of the road sign images is/was copyrighted by one of
their photographers and that they are owed 600.00 no questions asked, paid right now.


Today I talked to one of my contract job's project administrators
that handles huge national photography projects and he said he
thought if an image on the web was not noted with copyright info
written on it or if it did not have copyright info in the meta data
then the image was not protected and then open to be copied.


With this said I would have never used an image that was
copyrighted where I thought a thumbnail road sign image would not have been of such importance. I think Getty Images is just trying to push
people around by scaring them since they are such a huge imaging
company where they just think people will fold and pay them the
money. As a working photographer in a tough market I personally would
not flip my lid and try and charge someone 600 dollars for such a
small, low quality and unimportant image. If someone was to use one
of my images that I put on the web I make sure to upload them at a
very small size where I wouldn't really care if someone used it
because of this fact.


Does anyone have any info/suggestions that they could give me from a
professional point of few? We have since taken the image down and
have given an apology where Getty Images is still going to pursue
collecting the money. If the fee was lower and more reasonable I
would just pay it since they are claiming that it was copyrighted but
600 dollars for a thumbnail sized image for web use is outrageous. Remember I downloaded this image 4 to 5 years ago where since then the web has progressed in many ways and that includes copyright rules.