Hi there, I was just wondering how sites like Egoastic! manage to run without getting sued? I mean, they have tons of celebrity pictures there, and I've pretty sure the owners haven't been running around with their own cameras. I'm also sure they haven't been paying for them to some firm. However, I have noticed that they have hidden their whois information and that they credit to the photographers. This must mean that this site is actually illegal?
If they didn't pay the photographers for the use of the images then the site would indeed be illegal since they would be violating various copyrights. The fact that they credit the photographers wouldn't negate the copyright infringement. However there is no way to tell whether they have any deals with photographers or not, so it's best not to try a "The are doing it... so I can too" defense. You never know what licenses/deals a site might have.
Im not planing to start a celebrity site, I have tons of other projects going on. I was just wondering how that site, and thousands of other celebritysites survive out there.. Maybe I should get into the legal industry and start suing everyone that uses images without permission
yeah the site has 1,200,000 pageviews per day. I'm sure that they can afford to get there pictues off Getty or other photo source.
They do have alot of other sources for they pictures too. They have been credit alot of the pics to Arena, Maxim and other sources. I can't imagine why those sources would sell their pics to competition..
I run a celebrity image blog (pretty similar to Egotastic) and dont pay for anything, but we do have limits on what we can post. We post a lot of scans from magazines (FHM, Nuts, Zoo etc.) These publications allow us to post their stuff as a lot of the time the images act as a free promotional tool because if people like the images online then a lot of the time they will go out and buy the mag. Some publishers request that there content is not used and as such we do not publish their stuff, such as Playboy and Getty. Any publisher requesting that their content is not published or for existing content to be removed and we will remove it immediately. Many of the candid/papped pictures circulating celeb blogs are distributed for free amongst many other celeb blogs. These are generally free game and we post as many of these as we can. Screencaps from TV and movies are again on a case by case basis with almost every channel (in the UK) not bothered if we post their stuff as the show has already aired by the time we post. We also get a lot of our content from celeb forums where content is distributed freely. Many of these forums are regularly checked by the legal departments of certain publications for breach of copyright so the stuff on these forums is generally ok to post. And then there are the best kind of images, the ones which are released for promotion by public relations people. These are designed to be distributed freely as they are promoting something. All in all, there is a risk but if you dont blatantly infringe copyright and refuse to remove them when asked then you should be ok. Most publications are ok about it and will simply ask you to take down their material. You will only get sued (usually) if you refuse or ignore their request. EDIT: Forgot to mention, some images are watermarked and can also be freely distributed (with the publishers permission). For example, we are allowed to post watermarked Getty images but not the HQ un-watermarked versions.