I'D SURE NOT RECOMMEND ANYONE IGNORE ANY LETTER CLAIMING COPYRIGHT. I'd write back being profusely sorry, tripping over yourself appologizing, letting them know you had no idea and that you have immediately removed the offending image(s) and also added a link back to Getty Images suggesting other's visit their site and use their great services. If you make money with your website, I'd seriously consider buying a subscription to istockphotos (Getty's least expensive stock photo site) to try to make amends because they can sue you for BIG BUCKS AND WIN!

Aren't most of us on the internet to make money, either directly by selling a product and/or service, or indirectly by running paid advertising on our pages? Do you blame Getty Images, who's life blood is selling licenses to high quality stock images, for trying to protect their income? Wouldn't you all do the same?

The law that says "the person had no idea the image was copyrighted so is innocent" would have to prove that they've lived in a vacumn for the last 10 years. Nearly everyone now knows the law that says as soon as a creative work is created, it's protected by copyright. THIS MEANS THAT EVERYONE SHOULD ASSUME EVERY IMAGE IS COPYRIGHTED, unless they know for sure it's not. If someone buys a website, or grabs an image from an email, or somewhere else, and they attempt to make ANY money though their website (google or yahoo ads on their site, local ads which paid to be on their site, asking for donations, etc, then they are certainly eligible to be sued and will have to pay to defend themselves in court of law and stands a good chance of being guilty of copyright infridgement. If that image is copyrighted through the government the compensation can be as much as 100,000.00 PER INFRINDGEMENT. Borrow 5 images, you could end up owing 500,000.00.

As for simply asking for them to remove their image, there is absolutely no deterent in that option to stop others from taking their images, using them until they are "caught" and then changing the image. We'd like to think this was a perfect world and that other's wouldn't do that, but we know better. Getty relies on their image licenses to pay their employees and bills for heaven's sake. They can't have people on the net "borrowing" their images and using them for months at a time, with no threat of significiant punishment. I have a feeling, if it went to court, Getty would have a really strong case against the client, unless they made absolutly no money, or no future promise of monitary gain, with their website on which the image was used for design or enhancement.

Do you think it's right to download copyright music for free? If you do, then you are wrong. It's not right, and neither is using images for free unless you know for certain that they are, indeed, free to use.

Getty images is obligated to go after those that would use their images illegally. It's the only way for them to keep their reputation high with their photographers and to protect their images and the images of their photographers.

If you need professiona, high quality images, for 49.00 through Stock Photos | Shutterstock: Royalty-Free Subscription Stock Photography & Vector Art, one can buy a license to purchase 5 royality free images from their over 6 million professional images. These are some of the best high quality images on the net. That's less then 10.00 image and i'd put those images up head to head with Getty Images. If you don't need high resolution (smaller resolution is more then enough for a website) then you can get double the images for the same price. More then enough to make your website shine! That's far less then the trouble you could let yourself in for if you use an image you don't know where it came from that may have a big gun bodyguard behind it.

I am a new stock photographer, and believe that www.photospin.con and Stock Photos | Shutterstock: Royalty-Free Subscription Stock Photography & Vector Art are two of the best and least expensive sites for high quality stock photography. If you're a photographer and don't know about Stock photography, go check out my site www.dustie.com/stockphotography.htm and maybe you'll find this would be a way for you to make money with the hundreds of images sitting on your computer taking up space. You keep the copyright, just license the images to the public as Royality Free for certain uses. It's a great program.... If you decide to do it, shutterstock has a referral program. If you go sign up through the link on the site I gave you, I'll be tied to you and recieve a small percentage of your sales (doesn't affect what you make). That would be great, expecially if you are a fab photographer and eventually make thousands on stock photographers. Hey, it's possible...I know someone making over 5,000.00 a year on his stock photographer galleries. He's on every stock photo site with thousands of images taken over the last 5 years.

BOTTOM LINE....if you can't make your own images, or take the pictures you want, or find a picture you want to use on some of the free sites (Morgue Files: Web Design Graphics & Website Image Elements is one) then buy your photos from a stock photo site and don't run the risk of being sued, or even threatened with suit.

Honesty and fairness is always the best policy, really.