Here at The Tech Tribe, we work hard to make sure that all the photography, videos and audio we distribute to our members to use are properly licensed for you to use.
This means either we purchase the appropriate license that allows us to distribute to our clients OR we use Royalty Free stock that doesn't require attribution for commercial use.
(you can find more details on our ethos around attribution here)
However, every now and then one of our members will forward us a "threat" they received from a legal firm or agency, typically asking them to pay to stop using one of their "clients" images / videos / audio and often requesting money.
And so far, in every single one of these cases, we've investigated it and it's turned out to be a scam.
Unfortunately, just like the hacking world, there's a bunch of immoral people who setup "official" sounding firms, agencies and businesses and then prey on small businesses who are using Royalty Free Images, trying to trick them into thinking they've accidentally used a copyrighted asset and trying to extract money from them.
To help combat this, each time we distribute a Royalty Free image to our members to use, we also include the source URL of where it was obtained from for their records.
This is what that looks like in a Blog Post example:
If you click on the link, you'll see that the image in question is being distributed Royalty Free by Unsplash under their Unsplash License:
Unsplash is one of the most popular Royalty Free image platforms in the world and they have a large team of people making sure every image they have listed is compliant.
You can find a list of the other main Royalty Free sites we use here.
Typically you can just ignore these requests as the people behind them usually send out tens of thousands of them hoping a few people will bite / fall for it and send them some money.
(just like spammers and hackers)
However if you get one of these requests that you're especially worried about, then some other options are:
- Replace that image on your website with another image, you can find millions on the sites we mention here.
- Ask your lawyer to reply to them letting them know that the image was sourced legally from the URL we've provided you and request the firm to never contact you again with a vexacious claim like this. Be careful with this one though as some of these "scammers" when they receive a reply (a nibble) they will see this as an open invite to keep pushing and pushing and end up wasting your time and your lawyers time.