All these comments about a silly watermark and not one mention of Getty Images's contemptible RIAA-like business tactics of shaking down people who use their photos illegally? The owner of my daughter's daycare had posted one of their images on a simple little website he built for us parents, and they sent him a letter demanding a few hundred dollars or were going to take him to court for thousands (he paid up). Apparently they must have some type of crawler that searches the Web for their images.
It obviously depends on the numbers involved, but from your brief description nothing sounds wrong. It's pretty hard to "accidentally" stumble onto a Getty image used without a copyright statement which could lead you to think it's free to use, and a few hundred bucks is about what Getty charges as the rack-rate for a small business using one of their images (as you can see from their website).
Maybe there are details I'm missing, but you don't mention any RIAA-like practices or gross inflation of the cost/damages.
You might be right - I've never been in the situation - but he claimed to have taken it from some other site without any obvious copyright notice. Obviously not a smart move, and he did pay a price for it. The whole topic got brought up because I was planning on interviewing in one of their Rails shops and by doing research on the company I had stumbled across stories of people that had this exact thing happen to him, so I was shocked when he explained that it had happened to him as well.
I don't think the "fee" is unreasonable if a few hundred dollars is the going rate for licensing the image (although I personally would never pay that much), I just find the automated process of hunting these people down and asking for money right away (no option to just take it down immediately) a little distasteful, and in a similar vein to the RIAA's tactics.
Did that daycare owner really cause a harm worth hundreds of dollars - was the picture devalued that much by posting it on a micro website visited by maybe a dozen people? I think it helps to be a little objective here. I mean, I'm as capitalist as the next guy, but I fail to see how taking taking hundreds of dollars away from a small business owner who is technologically naive is correcting an imbalance in the free market.
It's a slippery path from there to charging arbitrarily ridiculous amounts like [$15K][1] for a violation, leading to insane lump sum damage amounts like [$75 trillion][2].
I won't argue about amounts, just the principle behind it.
I don't think it's got anything to do with devaluing the image by posting it on a micro website, so much as recognizing potential commercial value on someone else's work, without giving them their due.
If this had not been a business (like folks downloading mp3s, and not reselling them), I'd probably think about it differently, but in this case, there was specifically a commercial intent.
I agree the $15k / $75T thing is beyond ridiculous, especially given the non-commercial nature of that infringement. We're not arguing there.
I'm arguing 'oops, I'm sorry I made money using your work without paying you' isn't good enough. Who knows, maybe it could have been $5 - the sum isn't the important part, it's the principle.
