A company commissioned a new website from a web design company about 4 years ago. All went reasonably well and the site was finished as required. Three weeks ago the website owner received an invoice from a well known image provider claiming that one of the images on the website were theirs and being used without license. The image was actually used for the header of the website so quite a prominent image! The website owner had no idea that the image required a licence and had asked the question of the web designer company at the time. The web site owner was assured that no license was required. The company has access to tens of thousands of free images from their clients and would never need to go down the road of buying or using unlicensed images. Who is liable for this request for over £1000 bill? The website owner has contacted the owners of the image and suggested that they contact the design company. The image owners have said that they do not have a claim against the designers. H-E-L-P!
Does the company have an invoice and proof that they hired a design company to make the site? is the web design company still in business? Is it a company or some graphic designer out of his house? I'm not a lawyer, but I had the same thing happen to me. getty images called and said they were going to sue us for images that we did not have the license for, especially since we recieved their certified letters and we did not respond. The letters were being sent to a Mail Boxes Etc... that we previously had, and since we paid for the domain name registration for like 5 years, the Whois contact was out of date. We purchased the website from someone else, had proof of the purchase and we changed the 5 or so illegal pictures while on the phone with them. They wanted me to pay like 4k or 5k to make our problems go away. I sent them the proof that we bought the website previously that year and told them to go after the previous owner. The website was selling products and making us good money. I told them, hey we need pictures on the site, why don't I buy 1k worth of pictures and we call it even? After a couple phone calls, we bought the license for some photos and spent a little more than 1k. This was 1.5 to 2 years ago. I hope this helps and good luck to you.
Yes the company has proof of purchase. Yes the web design company is still in business and no it is not some guy working out of his bedroom. The website was designed and created by this company from scratch. Surly the liability lies with them, the designers/creators of the site?!?! I would be really interested to hear some more thoughts/views on this.
if it was from getty, typ getty images letter into google...lots of stuff there. When this happened to me, I never googled it but thought my above offer might make it go away, and I could afford it.
The short answer is both. The owner is liable for using the image, but they have recourse and they can go after the designer. The image owner does not have any reason to go after the designer only the owner. It is the owners responsibility to deal with the designer. The designer is the one at fault, but that does not absolve the owner of the site for having used the image.
"The web site owner was assured that no license was required." That's a big red flag right there. All images need permission for use and the designer should be able to provide you the usage rights they have for the image. It sounds like the designer is giving the website owner a load of bs if they cannot provide evidence of their usage rights. As browntwn as correctly stated, the website owner is responsible for paying the copyright owner. The website owner could then go after the designer to try and recover what they paid.