Hi folks,
I was hoping some kind legal person could give me some advice. I'm an old CUK poster but haven't posted in a few years.
I have a small consultancy (3 people). We're not very big so we have a fairly basic website. It was done by a friend of a friend (who worked for a lage media corp.) for a couple of hundred quid as a freelance contract. He provided all content, images, graphics etc based on our text and specifications.
A few months ago I noticed that our site had been crawled by an unknown robot, which turned out to be a picture scanner for Getty Images. On further investigation it turned out that one of the images the designer used on a secondary page was a Getty image. As soon as I worked this out, I removed all images from our website.
Yesterday I recevied a demand from Getty for nearly £2K for backpayment of Unauthorised Use of the image.
What I was hoping I could get advice on is the following (all based on the fact that I don't want to simply pay up without researching my options):
1) I employed a 3rd party to produce the website. He did not indicate that he was using copyrighted images, nor did he ask us to seek a license. I therefore was not aware of any infringement
2) As soon as I found out in July (off my own research) I removed all images without waiting to be asked!
3) I received no warning from Getty asking me to sort it out before they took action.
4) The demand date is end of August and states that "we are using and image". In fact, on the demand date we were not using the image and had not done so for a couple of months.
5) The acutal cost of the image for the use we intended was $650.00, well below the price they are asking now.
Is there anything I can do? Can I challenge the demand overall, or dispute the price?
All help welcome. Thanks in advance.
Mullanrail
I was hoping some kind legal person could give me some advice. I'm an old CUK poster but haven't posted in a few years.
I have a small consultancy (3 people). We're not very big so we have a fairly basic website. It was done by a friend of a friend (who worked for a lage media corp.) for a couple of hundred quid as a freelance contract. He provided all content, images, graphics etc based on our text and specifications.
A few months ago I noticed that our site had been crawled by an unknown robot, which turned out to be a picture scanner for Getty Images. On further investigation it turned out that one of the images the designer used on a secondary page was a Getty image. As soon as I worked this out, I removed all images from our website.
Yesterday I recevied a demand from Getty for nearly £2K for backpayment of Unauthorised Use of the image.
What I was hoping I could get advice on is the following (all based on the fact that I don't want to simply pay up without researching my options):
1) I employed a 3rd party to produce the website. He did not indicate that he was using copyrighted images, nor did he ask us to seek a license. I therefore was not aware of any infringement
2) As soon as I found out in July (off my own research) I removed all images without waiting to be asked!
3) I received no warning from Getty asking me to sort it out before they took action.
4) The demand date is end of August and states that "we are using and image". In fact, on the demand date we were not using the image and had not done so for a couple of months.
5) The acutal cost of the image for the use we intended was $650.00, well below the price they are asking now.
Is there anything I can do? Can I challenge the demand overall, or dispute the price?
All help welcome. Thanks in advance.
Mullanrail
