Of Pictures and Photos
6 05 2007Every webmaster will want to use pictures,photos and other graphics to make their site look better and who could blame them! In almost every webmaster forum you see threads that xxx has sent me a bill for $x,xxx for a photo I have used on my site.
The usual story here is that a website is using a picture or photo that they have no rights to use and the Stock agency is simply sending them a bill for usage of the image. The threads on these forums usually end up with a lot of people who don’t have a clue saying things like “don’t pay” “ignore the notice” and things like that.
Well lets look at the truth of the matter. In every instance where someone gets such a notice they actually ARE using an image that they don’t have the rights to use on their site - and the person getting the bill for usage never denies the usage.
The whole reason people get these bills is that they are either ignorant of the licencing requirments for the image or they are a theif who has stolen someone else’s images. As ignorance is no defence there is no excuse for anyone ever using images for which they don’t have the rights to use.
Now the solution to this problem is fairly easy - but it does mean that a little bit of “due diligence” is required. Firstly, when creating a website and you need images you should find out where and how you can legally obtain them and if you are purchasing an established website that has images/graphics and photos on it you should also ensure that you protect yourself from possible future large bills.
There are several places where you can legally get images/photos from for use on your website and the most obvious one is to go out and take the photo’s yourself. While this is not possible for everyone in every situation there are of course a lot of other places to look.
The safest place to obtain images is from one of the several Stock photo sites. Read their terms of use, purchase the rights you need and get on with it. There are of course 2 type of stock sites - the Traditional and Micro’s. A traditional stock site may charge as much as $500 for usage of a single photo and this is out of the reach of the average webmaster. This is where the micro stock agencies come into play.
At the microstock websites you can purchase royalty free rights to use a photo for less than $5 - In some cases you can purchase the rights for as low as $1 per photo. These Microstock sites have anywhere upwards of 1 Million Photos that you can look thru to find what you need. In most cases you will find several photos that meet your requirements that cost less than your lunch!
When it comes to purchasing a website that has photos on it the easiest way to protect yourself is to ensure you have a statement that grants you rights to the images on the site. If the seller is not willing to give a statement to you then it is time to steer clear of the seller because the “bargain” you thought you were getting might just cost you a small fortune!
Resources:
Download Stock Photos from Shutterstock
Chosse from over 1,000,000 photos from Big Stock Photo
$1 Photos for high resolution Photos from Dreamstime
