That's the whole purpose of a stock photo website.
To easily track down the owner of the image and buy a license to use it for money.
You can do it manually by contacting a person directly, negotiating a fee for a license to use that image, but that takes time. Stock sites speed up the process.
Just because the photo was not sourced from a stock photo website does not remove the need for copyright or payment.
It's like saying "I copied a dvd and didn't buy it from a dvd shop, so I don't need to pay for it".
I'm allowed to copy John Carter (2012) dvds and do what I like with them because it made a loss of $125m and the only people who saw it were the director's family, next door neighbour and pet dog.
The bigger the design firm, the more aware they should be of copyright law and their legal obligations.
The fact they used the photo shows it had value, otherwise they would have taken a custom photo themselves. There are plenty of stock photos of VHS tapes, the fact they used google is a massive error on their part.
This is their daily job and the image will be reproduced millions of times. This is not simply someone who borrows a photo for their personal blog.
There's nothing in copyright which takes that into account. The photo is copyrighted. Netflix makes a huge deal about copyright and goes out of its way to restrict what you can see and do with their stuff. Yet they ignore copyright because reasons.
Why would it be ok to copy a photo because then another company can make money off it because the initial person may or maybe not made the picture to make money?
> You go to your boss and say, "Mr Boss, there is no price here but I would like to negotiate with the owner of the blog and pay them."
Stock photo websites exist to solve this problem. If you really, really couldn't find a suitable image on a stock photo website, that kind of demonstrates the value of the image and the necessity of negotiating with the creator directly.
To easily track down the owner of the image and buy a license to use it for money.
You can do it manually by contacting a person directly, negotiating a fee for a license to use that image, but that takes time. Stock sites speed up the process.
Just because the photo was not sourced from a stock photo website does not remove the need for copyright or payment.
It's like saying "I copied a dvd and didn't buy it from a dvd shop, so I don't need to pay for it".