NEWSFLASH! I have a blog! As you probably guessed by the sheer fact you're here now. And sometimes in that blog I use pictures.
And one of those pictures cost me about $650!
I put a blog up a few years back about celebrities doing VO work. Celebrities who are in no need of the money yet are effectively taking a job away from a working voice actor who could actually USE that money and that cache with the booking. You can find the blog post here. And, yes, I took down the offending picture.
It was up there for a few years when I suddenly received an email from a company called PicRights. What they do is represent rights holders (Reuters, Getty Images, etc.) and they send bots out all over the internet to find their clients' images. The bots send back information on any images they find and subsequently report if any are being used without a license.
Now I'm a small potatoes person with a blog that isn't monetized. I just blog to get some ideas and thoughts out there and maybe keep the SEO freshened up (clicks baby!), but that doesn't matter to the bots.
If you're using something of their clients without permission and/or a license, you gonna get dinged.
So i got dinged.
What happened? After consulting with a lawyer who did his 'lawyer thing' were we able to get them down from their initial fee of $950 to about $650. Tried to get 'em lower but I was at the point where I was done with it all. "Fine. You Win."
Needless to say I scraped my website of anything questionable and replaced it with stock images from a service I pay for.
A little heads up that even if you screen capture the image, they can still tell what the image is.
The lesson here? Get a subscription to Envato. Lots of stock images, videos and templates.
Oh, and, don't be using copyright material unless you got the okay/license to do so.
You're welcome!
