Question -- Copyright Material

Hi,

I received a call about a week ago, asking if I was the owner of a website... I said yes, and they introduced themselves and said I had copyrighted images on my site... I told them I would take them down, and immediatly did... Can they do anything further... if I have taken the image down...?

i never received a dmca notice or anything just the phone call..

If you took the image down, you should be fine. As long as you complied with their request, they can't do anything to you.

Yeah, I think they have to give you notice first before suing. At least I've always been sent stuff! Usually from a lawyer!

The normal course of action is to notify the website owner and present a C&D letter. If you refuse then they can legally pursue you.

I agree with Bertbaby, Zoop & Boris. If you take action once contacted and remove copyrighted material, you will be fine. A bit of advice - there is quite a bit of Royalty free/Stock photos photos available. The bestknown site is probably sxc dot hu that has a large pool of free photos and images. Legally.
If you cannot find anything for free, istockphoto prices are beyond you, and feel using someone's restricted photo is a must, I suggest the following:
1. Open the photo in an image editor and clean it of all tags, titles and related information.
2. Save it as a new file and change the name.
3. If possible, filp it horizontally and play with the hue and saturation.
This will reduce your likelyhood of being spotted. Yet I would not use this photos on anything I'd like to use permanently, like a an article I plan to syndicate or webpage header graphics. Rather in posts on the site that are easily changed if needed.

The third and semi-legal way is to look for download sites a'la avaxhome for their graphics sections and pick sth from the products marked as Stock images. These are being offered on paid sites like MRR infoproducts and their creators know that people buy them for publishing. So determining how they were obtained would prove much harder.

They can... they could sue you. But most don't do it. You broke the law when you stole their content (i had my site shut down )

just dropping the content you should be fine..
i once had a site with the Bay termination and was contacted by ebay legal ..to shut or change the site name ..
i did and that was that..seems proihibited to use the Bay word