We received an initial Getty Images Extortion letter back in November 2013. I've heard of Getty Images and their extortion habits from people I know, and from a few articles I read within the last few years. I never thought myself nor my company would ever receive one of their extortion letters, but nothing is in possible.
When I first received it in the beginning of November 13', I almost thought it was a scam (interesting Freudian slip right?) and didn't think twice was about it. To the late end of November 13th, I received another extortion letter from them, which at this time I definitely paid more attention. It claimed we were hosting a copyrighted image on our website and it said we could "settle the situation" with a one time payment of
$1,820. Right off the bat, I knew something was fishy...
At the time we hosted 3 websites within our company; a company website, a marketing site, and a brand new website that was still in development. Of course it was the brand new website in development they were complaining about (JRSEOVideoPro.com; which isn't even registered nor active). Here is the brief (and I mean very brief) story of the situation and website:
We paid a 1099 Independent Contractor to create a website for JRSEOVideoPros.com. This website was going to be used to attract Realtors, Insurance Agents that were interested in having a company create and market YouTube videos. We paid this person $300 for the design. The 1099'er purchased a web design template from a website (I do not know where) and used the stock photos that came with the template. He assured me several times via Skype all the images were stock photos (royalty free).
JRSEOVideoPros.com was registered on October 21st 2013. The site was on-line about a month before Getty Images first contacted us via USPS mail about the infringement (From memory in November). At the time of them contacting us the site was receiving absolutely NO TRAFFIC = i.e no visitors. In fact most of the pages were not even completed yet. Absolutely no business was transacted through the website. To further prove this point JRSEOVideoPros.com isn't even listed in Google (site:JRSEOVideoPro.com) and there isn't even a cached version from Google (cache:JRSEOVideoPros.com). Which this proves Google never even crawled the website. There is only a brief showing of JRSEOVideoPro.com on the "Wayback Machine".
As you can see from the website (JRSEOVideoPros.com) it isn't even registered nor hosted anywhere. This was done back in May 2014. There wasn't a need to keep it and we decided to relinquish the domain back to GoDaddy.
Our 1099'er used a photo from a template he purchased that claimed it was stock; it was literally 2" in size. The site was on-line barely a month, and once Getty Images contacted us we immediately removed the image. The domain was never indexed into Google, never received any traffic, and no sales were generated from this website.
A few days ago we received another "more threatening" extortion letter this time from McCormak Intellectual Property Business Law PS. Demanding that we pay the
$1,820 before August 29th, 2014 and it "
will end this matter immediately".
I have already had my company legal counsel review this website as well as other information. I feel confident in any decision we choose as she has 15+ years herself as a copyright attorney for a huge law firm based out of San Diego, CA. I wanted to share my situation, and hope people can learn from it also. This is utter extortion. The prices they come up with aren't based on reality, and I feel bad for people who pay their ransom fees.
Letter from McCormark's office (nice template; worn about signature):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xfad3px2x7nbk7y/bs-letter.jpg
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