The letter arrived at Dave Formella's Long Beach travel agency the other day. It's fair to say it freaked him out.
"It has come to our attention that you are using an image represented by Getty Images for online promotional purposes," the letter from the photo service began. It demanded $1,000 in damages, or $900 if Formella agreed to pony up the cash within two weeks.
"We were really surprised, because we didn't think we were using any copyrighted pictures," Formella, 51, told me. He said he immediately pulled every photo from his company's site, which had been put together by a Web-design firm.
But Formella said he won't pay hundreds of dollars for inadvertently using the photo -- a generic shot of a woman sitting in front of a computer. Getty charges as little as $49 to license such images.
"A thousand dollars in damages?" Formella said incredulously. "Are they kidding?"
That's undoubtedly a common reaction among the tens of thousands of people who receive such letters each year from Getty and another leading image provider, Corbis, owned by Bill Gates.
But Getty and Corbis say their efforts to enforce copyrights of the more than 200 million photos under their control ensure that the photographers who took the shots are rightly compensated for their work.
Many of these photographers are essentially small businesses too, just like Formella. Typically they pocket between 30% and 70% of licensing fees for copyrighted works.
Getty and Corbis say the steep penalty for copyright infringement is also needed to serve as a deterrent. But how much is too much?
Oscar Michelen, a New York attorney who focuses on damages claims by Getty and Corbis, called four-figure fines "a legalized form of extortion."
"The damages they're requesting aren't equal to the copyright infringement," he said, adding that "there's no law that says definitively what images are worth in the digital age."
Getty, for one, doesn't see it that way.
"This level of damages is supported by the cost we incur," said Lisa Willmer, corporate counsel for Getty Images. "What we're asking for is supported by the facts."
She said Getty typically factors in the original licensing cost of a photo and how long the copyright infringement lasted, as well as the company's expenses in pursuing a damages claim. Most such claims, she said, range from $1,000 to $1,200.
