A warning to anyone having a website built for them....

[Ruth Mills]

Personally, if I ever found my work on somebody elses website or public material, I would contact them via email or in writing (so that it is documented) and ask and give them xxx amount of time to remove the image before proceeding with legal action.

That would be the normal course of action that most honest, reasonable people would take if they found their copyright was infringed, i.e. sending a "Cease and Desist" letter and allowing a reasonable amount of time for the copyright infringer to take down the image before proceeding with legal action.

Sadly not the case with these big American companies by the sound of it though!

 

[Ruth Mills]

Actually, if I'd ever paid to have a website designed, and ended up getting one of these letters from an image that the web designer had used (as opposed to an image that I had specifically sent them for use on my site) then I would give the web design company hell and demand that they claim on their professional indemnity insurance for the copyright breach, as it was their incompetence that led to the breach of copyright! That's assuming that they actually had insurance!!!

 

[Web geoff]

well said to Ruth,

I work as a professional freelance web designer, I have fully protected professional indemnity insurance, but also properly purchase each image I might use on clients website in accordance with the T&C's of the image seller ect.

Corbis are so renowned for this, many years ago I used an image of a secretary on a phone for a personal website of mine and got a letter through one day from Corbis asking for naerly £1800. I VERY politely wrote with sincere appologies asking for them to forgive my ignorance and removed the image right away, I got away with it, but was lucky.

This was when I was not clued up on this, but ultimatley you should have a reciept for the design of your website ect and be able to prove that it was not you that took the image, but the designer. What a bad designer he is.

Geoff

 

[Chloe D]

Just to add that it is not hard for these companies to find you as a quick search of the ownership of the domain name on WHOIS will usually bring up all your details including your address.

 

[Ruth Mills]

well said to Ruth,

I work as a professional freelance web designer, I have fully protected professional indemnity insurance, but also properly purchase each image I might use on clients website in accordance with the T&C's of the image seller ect.

Corbis are so renowned for this, many years ago I used an image of a secretary on a phone for a personal website of mine and got a letter through one day from Corbis asking for naerly £1800. I VERY politely wrote with sincere appologies asking for them to forgive my ignorance and removed the image right away, I got away with it, but was lucky.

This was when I was not clued up on this, but ultimatley you should have a reciept for the design of your website ect and be able to prove that it was not you that took the image, but the designer. What a bad designer he is.

Geoff

Are you aware of being able to block certain ranges of IP addresses used by PicScout's bots, so as not risking anything like that happening again? If PicScout's bots can't access your site, then they can't flag up any images. This link is a good reference for more information PicScout, Getty Images and Goodbye iStockPhoto..!

You could probably do something using .htaccess files on Apache, to return "403 forbidden" error messages for any images requested by PicScout's IP address range, assuming that you are using someone else's Apache hosting rather than your own dedicated server (if you have your own dedicated server, just configure the firewall to block the IP addresses in question and save yourself some bandwidth)...

 

[Beautification]

Exactly champagne!
If a photo can't be used by everyone then it shouldn't be on the bloody internet..

well by that i mean google images etc..taking pictures off someone's website or someone's facebook a no no, but google images well bloody idiot's shouldn't have let it get their in the first place, i bet it turns out they don't even own that image!!

Good luck hunxx

 

[Ruth Mills]

Exactly champagne!
If a photo can't be used by everyone then it shouldn't be on the bloody internet..

well by that i mean google images etc..taking pictures off someone's website or someone's facebook a no no, but google images well bloody idiot's shouldn't have let it get their in the first place, i bet it turns out they don't even own that image!!

Good luck hunxx

It is possible to block Google adding images to Google Image Search from your website though; you could add a "robots.txt" file to the top level directory of your website to tell Google not to index any images. Google is pretty good at obeying the contents of "robots.txt" files too - unlike PicScout who poop all over the robots standards and index what they like...

 

[nailzoo]

Why don't you just use your own images ?

After all, they are truly representative of the realistic end result the client is going to get.