The Images You Have On Your
Site Can Get You Into Legal Trouble

So maybe you have a blog, maybe you have a complete website or maybe you have just a little minisite. You're probably using images.

Many people who are beginning in the internet marketing business want to get things cheap. So they hire that cheap designer they saw on a forum or some freelancer site and be happy that they only pay 50 bucks for that minisite created and 20 bucks for the ebook cover. Woah! Only 70 bucks! What a bargin!

What they don't know is that these cheap designers are very dangerous. Since these designers are cheap, not only they probably aren't professionals & make you a preatty crappy site, they also don't know much about their field and don't know anything about image copyrights.

That's right! So since they don't know they shouldn't use any image they find on the web to make your site, they just search google images, or browse some other sites in search for images to create your site. It's not their fault, most of them probably don't know they shouldn't use them because all images are copyrighted.

So they proceed creating your site. They take the image, punch a text next to it. Done! You receive your site done in a few days and are really satisfied for such a cheap work.

Your Own Graphic Designer Can
Get You Into Massive Trouble!

Fast-forward about 6-7 months, you're business is doing good, your site is drawing attention, everything is starting to bloom. But then, you get home one day to find a letter from a stock image company such as "Getty Images" to inform you that you're illegaly using their content and you need to pay $2,640 for every image you have on your site or risk taking this to court for copyright infringement. They also make the totals for you. You have about 3 images from them displaying on your site, 3 X 2.640 = $7,920 !!

Suddently that cheap minisite got very expensive.

And just because you wanted to save a few hundred bucks.

You try to negotiate with them saying that you'll pay the images at their normal price or take them down but they don't want to hear it. So, to avoid legal troubles you end up paying that $7,920 PLUS the $70 you paid for the site & cover before that means you end up paying $7,990 for a crap minisite and a few images with a fat dude showing his man boobs.

All of which could have been avoided if you could have just paid the few extra hundred bucks to hire a professional who will actually buy the images and knows what he's doing.

I didn't knew all of this either until my designer explained it to me.

Take my site for example. The images used to create it have been bought by my designer from fotolia. And I use some images from psd graphics or I buy them from fotolia if I need anything special.

I actually started doing some reasearch on this and I've found out that these "settlement demand letters" sent by Getty Images or others are quite common. And they don't actually go themselves looking for images, they actually have a company that creates some web-crawlers, kinda like the google spiders, but these crawlers are searching for images on thousands of sites per day.

In case you allready are into this kinda of a mess I found a good resource for you: http://extortionletterinfo.com/

It's a lawyer that deals with these kinds of issues.

But it's best of all to be avoided. Get a professional designer and avoid the cheap ones like the plague.

In case you want to buy some images yourself I recommend fotolia. Good, quality stock photos can be as low as 1$ for the lowest resolution. So you'll probably pay about 3$ per image. But you need to buy these in bulk or have a monthly subscription.

You also need to look at the images terms of service. Some images have limitations of use, depending on what you want to use the images for. These limitations usually only apply for print publications (like only x number of prints). I have looked on several sites and fotolia has been the best one I've found with the terms most flexible.

So go check out fotolia. I give it 5 stars.

Some people may ask me about who my graphic designer is. I don't want to really give him up publicly, but in case you want a good graphic designer you can email me and I'll hook you up. But don't contact me if you want some cheap deal.

Sincerely,