Anyone else had letter from Science photo library?

[AgentZero]

Hi all

 Today ive had the usual extortion letter from SPL (above) and ive seen tons of stuff about Getty and their scumbag ways but i cant find any other threads on the net about these guys.

Basically they want £400+ for use of 1 pic and after reading here ill reply with asking for proof of ownership, proof of exclusive rights ( ie that its not for sale anywhere else) and the exact date the alleged misuse started. They have stated that they require 3 years back payment and you can see that on the wayback machine the pic has been there 3 years

Do Getty and these other tossers usually know about the wayback machine in your experience?

thanks!

[UKLawyer]

Do these guys know about the internet archive?

Yes.

Do you know you can get your site taken off it?  If not, do it now.

You can also stop Google and other search engines creating cache pages of your web page too. 

Get the appropriate robots.txt file on the top level of your domain and if you cannot do that there are instructions for contacting the internet archive to get them to stop archiving your web pages:

https://archive.org/about/exclude.php

[letsbefair]

Yes, I just had a letter from SPL. They wanted £720 for the single use of a 600 x 400 pixel image on my website. The letter was probably their standard one and was uncompromising and somewhat intimidating. I had the written permission of the photographer to use the image, which was properly credited to the author, but SPL had obviously not bothered to check whether my use of the image had been agreed. When I copied the photographer's letter to them they eventually withdrew their threatening letter.

I don't disagree with the library's right to pursue copyright infringement but I do disagree strongly with the blunt, heavy-handed methods being employed. This sort of tactic can put small organizations out of business even if the alleged copyright infringement proves to be unjustified.

[stinger]

Kudos to you letsbefair, for having the permission letter and being able to reproduce it to make your claim go away.

[Greg Troy (KeepFighting)]

I second Stinger's comment, good job and you handled it very well.