Received a Demand Letter for a Photo on Your Website in Ohio? Read This Before You Pay

It usually arrives by email, looks official, and carries a deadline of about ten days out.

A company you’ve never heard of says it represents a photographer or stock-image agency.

It includes a screenshot of a photo on your website, and it is often on a blog post you published years ago and that’s when they get aggressive.

They want money and fast.

These letters are landing in the inboxes of Central Ohio businesses, nonprofits and professional firms with increasing frequency. One landed in ours.

It was a company named Copytrack that wanted roughly $2000 within 10 days for an image we have had on our website for six years. Here’s what you need to know.

Who is sending these letters?

A handful of image-enforcement companies with names like Copytrack, PicRights, Pixsy and ImageRights use automated software to crawl the web, match images against their clients’ catalogs, and generate demand letters at scale

Copytrack, one of the most active, is based in Berlin and now operates under the legal name RD Legal GmbH. Many of these companies work on contingency, keeping a share of whatever they collect.

That business model matters. Because matching is automated, letters sometimes go out for images that were properly licensed, came from a free or Creative Commons source, or belong to someone other than the claimed rights holder.

But automation cuts both ways: the software is good at finding real matches, and some enforcement companies and their partner law firms file suit.

Here is what you do:

• An email is not a lawsuit. It is simply an out-of-court demand. It carries no official court weight and does not obligate you to pay.
• Jurisdictional issues. Many of these companies are based overseas. To legally enforce a copyright claim in Ohio, they  must first register the copyright in the US Copyright Office and hire attorneys licensed to practice in Ohio. Due to the high cost of litigation, they rarely pursue small claims in court. One exception to watch for: rights holders can file smaller claims with the U.S. Copyright Office’s Copyright Claims Board, an online tribunal with a $100 filing fee and a $30,000 cap on damages. A notice from the CCB is not a letter to ignore.
• That being said. Check your records. Look for the license. Stock subscriptions (Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, Getty, iStock and others), invoices, and your web designer’s or marketing agency’s files are the usual places. If an outside vendor built your site or wrote your blog content, the image may have come from them, and your contract may say who is responsible. If you find valid proof of license, sending it typically ends the matter.
• When in doubt, take the image down.  Before removing the image, document it, take a screenshot showing the page, the date and the image. Then remove or replace it. Taking it down stops ongoing use, but it does not erase past use, so don’t treat removal as a complete answer. And don’t delete related records.
• Be careful what you put in writing. An email that concedes you “took it from Google” or apologizes for “stealing” an image can become evidence. Keep early correspondence factual and brief or route it through counsel.

What you can do today

• Audit your website. Older blog posts and news pages are where most problem images live. Know where every image came from.
• Keep license records in one place. Save the license, invoice and download record for each stock image, tied to where it’s used.
• Tighten vendor contracts. Agreements with web developers, agencies and freelancers should require them to use only properly licensed content and to indemnify you if they don’t.

Don’t pay — or panic — before you know where you stand

Carlile Patchen & Murphy’s intellectual property team helps Central Ohio businesses, nonprofits and professional firms evaluate image-copyright demands, check registration and ownership claims, and negotiate resolutions. Received one of these letters? Send it to us before the deadline or call 614.228.6135. Want to get ahead of the next one? Ask us about a website image and vendor-contract audit.

Related: What Ohio Businesses Need to Know From the Buc-ee’s Lawsuits