The place I work for has an open ended CMS and someone put a few low res' images from the net up.  PicScout is a company that makes a lot of cash by finding copyright infringement and sending an invoice via FedEx for an outrageous amount of cash. ($1,200-$1,500 per image infraction). 

Removing the images does not revoke the copyright infraction.  If a third party such as the person who built your web site used the images or any part of the image -- even if they were not aware of that the image was part of the Getty (or Corbis) image gallery.

If you had a predecessor who used some images, you removed them, completely rebuilt the web site but on an archive 3rd party web site a copy exists - they will still sue. 

http://williamfaulkner.co.uk/wordpress/archives/84

There is some action you can take to protect for your site from the intrusive bots they use that take up bandwith and may target you for legal action.

As an artist and designer I'm all for copyright protection - but I can't say it any better then the link above did, I am "opposed to the use of these heavy-handed, nefarious, deceitful, resource consuming activities from Getty and PicScout."

Definitely check out the above link if your a webmaster! ;-)

Of course one can always refuse any unexpected courier mail deliveries.....

I'm for the idea, but seems like they take it too far

so what was the deal with your situation? they sent an invoice fedex?

According to that post, the guy mentions that he won't use iStock Photo anymore for fear of getting a bill. But I believe that iStock's policy states that you can use the images however you want, including web development.... as long as you don't put the picture on a coffee mug (or other physical item), and then SELL it.

The only other problem I can see is - Do they really expect people to pay the bill?

I'm not paying a bill like that unless I get a physical document and phone conversation with an actual lawyers office, with a set court date..... not some crack head company walking around with a business plan.

They can go %&#$ themselves as far as I'm concerned.

MrStitch wrote:

According to that post, the guy mentions that he won't use iStock Photo anymore for fear of getting a bill. But I believe that iStock's policy states that you can use the images however you want, including web development.... as long as you don't put the picture on a coffee mug (or other physical item), and then SELL it.

iStock also say you have to buy the image, rather than just using print-screen. If you buy the image then you have the image numer, which is like a receipt number and can be used to prove you have the right to use it

MrStitch wrote:

The only other problem I can see is - Do they really expect people to pay the bill?

I'm not paying a bill like that unless I get a physical document and phone conversation with an actual lawyers office, with a set court date..... not some crack head company walking around with a business plan.

They can go %&#$ themselves as far as I'm concerned.

The agencies involved here will threaten such action, and may actually go through with it. I know some people who have worked out how to make them go away - but this isn't legal advice so I'm not stating it here (it's not illegal, either!)

Lol @ stitch: "Crack head company"

Probably are too.

"Hey, i know how we'll make our next 10 bucks for the dealer, lets tell people they owe us money. Someones bound to pay up eventually. And anyway, I'm getting coldsores from our last idea"


It's got to be a Scam.
There is very little legality on the net anyway, what makes them think they've got any kind of authority?

You could argue that a hacker placed those images on your site. They can't prove it was you, nor can you prove it wasn't. which, in law, presents reasonable doubt and gets the case thown out, especially in the states.
hell, tell them they've spelt the image filename wrong, that'll get it thrown out!

Enough of those from the same scamming company would invoke all their cases to be thrown out before they reached a court room.

Cheeky sods.

infact, I'm abit mad that people are even doing this, I kinda hope there's a bill in the post this morning, just so i can tell them to shove it!!

I actually purchase my images from iStock, so I got nothing to worry about. What I'd like to know is, what's behind their 'bot' that sniffs them out? How does that work exactly?

Also, how can I tell if their bots are eating up my bandwidth?

If I got a bill from 'em, I'd just send them a return bill.....

$500 for wasting my time.
$2,000 for undue stress.
$0.41 postage.

MrStitch wrote:

Also, how can I tell if their bots are eating up my bandwidth?

check you logs for these IP addresses:

PicScout Crawling IPs
82.80.249.195
82.80.249.196
82.80.249.197
82.80.249.201
82.80.249.202
82.80.249.203
82.80.249.204
82.80.252.130

I checked on this end and nothing


i too buy from iStock regularly; although we usually "try on a few different items" until we find something that fits and we're sure, at which point we buy

If you think about it from a computers point of view, an image isn't a flat picture, it's a big block of binary.

I would imagine, a bot could crawl a page, strip out all the image calls and download them to a database. Then it would simply have to cross reference any images it has been asked to look for by checking for similar binary data.

It  probably wouldn't scout the net for images and try to find possible copyright infringements. That would be way too vast a job,  even for google. It'd probably be given a set of images to go scouting for with directives of the sort of places to go looking for them. What I'm trying to say is, it would need human interaction before it did anything: (go look for this image) rather than (hey I've found this image, with X numbers of copies. lets find out who owns it and get them to sue)

It's only a matter of time before google starts using this sort of thing in it's image search. I think I read somewhere that they already have a beta "Face recognition bot".