What is your actual experience with copyright infringement?

[OriginalMotive]

Hey all,

I?ve been reading quite a bit about image copyright infringement, something like 85-90% of all commercial sites do it (supposedly).

But what are your actual experiences with this?

I ask because I'm building niche sites but don't want to spend money on getting high-quality images - I'm just starting out, so I'm still a cheap bastard. Once I build up a bit of income, this won't really be a concern, but I can't yet afford to pay off copyright trolls in case one or more comes after me. Or companies that legitimately want their stuff taken off your site, though most I'm guessing would tell you to remove it, and if you did that's that.

It's the copyright trolls that have me worried: very aggressive, we-want-to-suck-you-dry-without-warning types. Since I've never done this before, they're a concern (I've been caught downloading a torrent once, but my ISP just gave me a warning. Anyway that made the possibility of copyright infringement very real to me).

So what is your actual experience with image copyright infringement? Am I making this out to be too big a deal because of media hype, or is it legitimately something to worry about? (I won't take a single thing off g e t t y i m a g e s, but I'm also not sure that's enough)

 

[Techxan]

I have had no problems with this because I own the rights to the images I use. There are PLR packs and free images everywhere, all you have to do is meet their requirements.

However, as a cheap bastard, you should consider this:

You spend an inordinate amount of time and resources to rank your sites, and then you purposefully give someone a reason and a mechanism to take all your money when the site succeeds.

It would be cheaper and a hell of a lot less hassle to just build the site and give it to someone you don't like.

 

[tony_d]

I don't think it's just they Gettys of the world you need to be worried about - there are 'enforcement houses' now offering very low cost services to image owners to trawl the interwebs looking for infringements (their upside of course is any action that is taken).
As techxan said - just spend a few dollars (literally, a few) and do it properly.

 

[antichrist]

I had a single email telling me the picture of an orange I used was copyrighted. I simply removed the image, picked a new one from google, and bam, no more issues.

 

[tony_d]

I had a single email telling me the picture of an orange I used was copyrighted. I simply removed the image, picked a new one from google, and bam, no more issues.

Great method! Now just rinse, repeat, and scale up!

 

[spmcnerd]

 

[ibraheemproductions]

Hey all,

I?ve been reading quite a bit about image copyright infringement, something like 85-90% of all commercial sites do it (supposedly).

But what are your actual experiences with this?

I ask because I'm building niche sites but don't want to spend money on getting high-quality images - I'm just starting out, so I'm still a cheap bastard. Once I build up a bit of income, this won't really be a concern, but I can't yet afford to pay off copyright trolls in case one or more comes after me. Or companies that legitimately want their stuff taken off your site, though most I'm guessing would tell you to remove it, and if you did that's that.

It's the copyright trolls that have me worried: very aggressive, we-want-to-suck-you-dry-without-warning types. Since I've never done this before, they're a concern (I've been caught downloading a torrent once, but my ISP just gave me a warning. Anyway that made the possibility of copyright infringement very real to me).

So what is your actual experience with image copyright infringement? Am I making this out to be too big a deal because of media hype, or is it legitimately something to worry about? (I won't take a single thing off g e t t y i m a g e s, but I'm also not sure that's enough)

youtube, bungie, microsoft, valve, ea, blackbox, bugbear, the list goes on... look up ibraheem_productions for details on youtube and reviews of games, n, stuff

 

[RushingStar]

People get very passionate about their work as artists. If you take an image and it's just some guy with no legal backing, he and his friends will harass you through e-mail and Facebook all day. Have no experience with the aggressive, legal types as far as individual images, but I did rip a whole site once and the original site had mine shut down through the host.

 

[manking]

I have used free stock images for all my websites, if you search enough you can find very good images, with different keyword, but what suits for your domain

 

[asiansamurai]

It seems like most of these images have codes embedded to them. Take a screenshot of the images instead and add it to your site.

 

[muscleteen]

I can't answer your question since I don't have any experience with that personally, but maybe this will help.

These 2 sites combined give you 65+ free image sources:

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/12-best-places-to-get-free-images-for-your-site-624818

http://blog.bufferapp.com/free-image-sources-list

So maybe you'll avoid the hassle and fear altogether