Complain for free

According to The Register web designers are complaining that they’re being fined and charged by Getty for using images on websites or stories they haven’t paid for!

My first reaction was mixed, take half from the side of the web designer “I brought the template, how was I supposed to know” and half from the photo agency “we own the photo you should pay for it” and you get my position.

A register reader (and probably web designer) has said “Website owners may have used [template] sites… or third party web designers where the implied status of the templates from these sources would indicate a royalty-free status.”

So with that in mind it’s a little bit crappy of Getty to target these individuals who don’t know any better, it would be more appropriate to say “we own the copyright to that image, please remove it or pay for it”.

However it looks like Getty are telling website owners to just pay up and are fining them.

Again according to the reg, a spokeswoman for Getty said it had been using a firm called Picscout to scan the web for COMMERCIAL websites - not hobbyists or bloggers using their photos without permission.

The first thing this says to me is “Yes I can use Getty Images and they’ll leave me alone” but I know it doesn’t work like that and it’s not really necessary.

You can buy photos for next to nothing to use on your blog through sites like iStockPhoto.com and LuckyOliver.com and for free in other places.

If you look to sites like the Stock Exchange at sxc.hu or do a search on flickr from Creative Commons photos there is a near endless supply of suitable pics to use on your site or with your story. Or if you want more than just photos the Creative commons search is a good one as well.

Most of the photos on this site (that I haven’t taken myself) have come from Flickr and the rest from iStockPhoto. As an example of the photos you can get for free I’ve included a hot issue photo on this story.

I went to the Guardian and looked at the top stories, the top story was the missing prostitutes so I looked the second story, the shooting of Hamas critics. Unfortunatly if I were to use any of the brilliant Hamas supporter photos on Flickr I would risk making it look like the people photographed were responsible - something I’m not going to do.

So I decided to go with photos of the Buncefield Oil Depot fire in Hemel Hempstead that happened a year ago. It’s a BBC News front page story and there are some incredible photos on Flickr.

As a side note, I’m a massive fan of Getty images and have spent a long time in the past looking at some of the incredible pieces of photo journalism their photographers get. Plus I’ve used their sport photos for stories on the BBC website (where the BBC has a contract with them).

Maybe Getty could offer a blogger licence - say 50p/£1 for a small blog (use Technorati rankings to judge how much to charge). Should open them up another market - I’d pay a small fee for a top quality photo related to a current story.

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