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Using Unlicensed Photos on Websites

By Joshua Kaufman

For the last six months, I have been getting no less than three phone calls or e-mails a week from clients who have gotten letters from photographers (or their representatives) seeking licensing fees for photos that have been posted without permission. These are clients who run legitimate businesses with robust websites, and many of the photos in question have been on their websites without incident for years.

For a long time people have generally felt it appropriate to go onto various image search engines, find a photo for a newsletter, website or whatever, and then cut and paste it into their publication or website. This trend did not generally apply to hard copy publications, because when you cut and paste something from the Internet, the quality is not sufficient to reproduce well in hard copy ' it pixilates and becomes distorted. However, due to the limited resolution of computer monitors, a cut-and-pasted image looks perfectly fine when copied to a website. As a result, based on either ignorance of copyright law, a belief in the myth of “it is on the Internet so I can use it,” or simply the calculation that the risk of getting caught was minimal, it is likely that hundreds of thousands of images have been cut and pasted, without license, into third-party websites and online publications.

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