This is just a precautionary tale to any of you who have taken images from the internet for use on your own website or promotional material and nothing to do with our business of providing office furniture.

You may think that no copyright exists ( the pictures may even be on a free picture site , but you must make absolutely of the status of the pictures. If you don’t, then there is a good chance that you will be slapped with a £1,000 bill by Getty Images, who seem to be very active in this respect.

It appears that they hold the copyright to many images on the internet, which for some reason do not have their watermark on them. This makes it very difficult to see if the picture is copyrighted, and if so, that it actually belongs to Getty Images.

What they do have is some imbedded code in the images which allows their sophisticated software to trawl the internet and seek out any unauthorised use.

We speak from experience as a free picture was innocently downloaded and used on one of our office furniture pages. This free picture subsequently turned out to be copyrighted to Getty Images and we had to pay the price.

There are many sites and forums offering advice on what to do if you unwittingly find yourself being threatened with legal action, some of which is useful and some, as you would expect from the internet, ridiculous. But whatever you do, do not  ignore their letter.

Getty Images have recently taken a removals company to court for unauthorised use of one of their images, and the final bill to the removals company was apparently in excess of £30,000, for a seemingly small and innocuous image, apparently downloaded in good faith from a free picture website. Going into battle with Getty Images is probably the domain for the very brave and the very rich.

Whether you believe, as some have suggested, that this an immoral approach by Getty Images, who use scaremongering and aggressive tactics to bully and frighten unsuspecting businesses and individuals into parting with their money, or that Getty Images are just correctly defending their copyrighted property against unauthorised use, please make sure that you take legal advice if you receive a letter from Getty Images.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that they will just go away.
If you want more information on this subject a good place to start is this link