In today’s marketing tip, I’m going to share a quick tip to saving yourself $249 in future marketing costs.
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Are you ready for the tip?
Here it is:
Don’t use graphics in your online or offline marketing that you don’t own, or have rights to use for personal or commercial use.
Just because you found the image on Google doesn’t mean that you legal rights, nor have a license to use it.
You’ll find out the hard way – like I did – that companies will come after you seeking payment for damages for your using their graphics without a license. I’m guessing they have a whole staff just scouring the Internet looking for their images and checking to see whether that web owner has a license for the image or not.
Years ago I hired a guy to build out a website for me. It looked great and had really nice graphics throughout the site. About a year later, Getty Images sent me a demand letter requesting that I pay them $2,500. I think we settled for about $850. It seems that the designer that created my site used Getty Images on my website without purchasing rights to use those images.
Just this last week, I received another letter from Getty. It appears that I referenced an image within a blog article on my site that they just so happen to license for $260/month. I didn’t even put the image on my server. I pulled the image directly from another website. That didn’t matter. They say I now owe them $249 in damages for using their image.
Moral of the story: don’t use images in your marketing that you don’t own, or have license to use. It will cost you. So if it’s going to cost you, you might as well spend the money to purchase a license and use the image freely as you need to use it in your marketing.
I hope this tip helps you.
Thanks for reading.
To your success,
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