I am an artist. I completely understand that artists need to protect their creations from thieves. I am in favor of that protection.
I ethically source every single image on the 35+ websites I own. Over the past twenty years I have purchased the rights to over 2,500 images from DepositPhotos. I found that DepositPhotos had a wonderful collection of high quality images. I am very willing to support those artists.
Now in 2023 I am receiving email messages from the legal department at Dreamstime, a completely DIFFERENT stock image company. Dreamstime and DepositPhotos are completely different companies.
The Dreamstime legal team is sending me multiple messages like this:
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Subject: Dreamstime image usage – Case XXXXXXXXX –
HI,
I’m Carmen representing Dreamstime.com, world’s leading stock photography community.
We detected at least one of our images displayed on your website. Thank you for using our visual content.
http://www.lisashea.com/lisabase/blog/index.php/2017/03/26/evening-meditation-time-271/
Properly licensing the images you use is important for both you and the content creator, as the creator of this image relies on the fees paid to have their copyrighted work used, and you are protected and indemnified against potential infringement claims.
Please reply to this e-mail and I’ll be happy to assist you with more details.
___________________________________
Best regards,
Carmen
Copyright and Media Usage – Dreamstime
Ph: +1 615 771 5611 (US)
legalusage@dreamstime.com
https://www.dreamstime.com
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Note that in the Dreamstime message they say “Thank you for using *our* visual content.” (emphasis mine). This even though Dreamstime knows, clearly, that the images they are providing are found on MANY MANY other stock photo websites. These images in the Dreamstime library are often VERY common images found for sale all over the web.
I promptly wrote Dreamstime back and explained that I had purchased my rights to the referenced images from DepositPhotos. I even went to the blog pages that Dreamstime referenced and added, right on each blog page, the illustrator name, the DepositPhotos reference ID, and so on.
Dreamstime then followed up with a fresh message, one per image.
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Hello Lisa,
Thank you for prompt reply.
If you have a license from a different supplier, please send it attached. In order for us to mark this case closed, we need a copy of the license proof document, a screenshot or any other file that confirms you hold a license to use the images.
I am sorry to have to ask this but I need evidence in order to mark this as closed.
Feel free to contact me should you have other questions or require further assistance .
……………………………………………………………………………………………
Best regards,
Carmen
Copyright and Media Usage – Dreamstime
Ph: +1 615 771 5611 (US)
legalusage@dreamstime.com
https://www.dreamstime.com
…
So this request now required me to log into my DepositPhotos account and for EVERY SINGLE IMAGE to generate the licensing paperwork to go with it. I then had to forward that licensing paperwork over to Dreamstime – a company I’ve never really had any relationship with. The licensing paperwork had my full name, my home address, my phone number, etc.
This is bad enough for a handful of images when I’m actually home at my desk. But what happens when I am away for a while and Dreamstime deluges me with 2,500 requests, one for every image I’ve ever purchased from DepositPhotos in the past two decades? This seems like an enormous burden to put on a single human being who is running a website with legitimately purchased resources. Why doesn’t Dreamstime simply interface with DepositPhotos and verify image rights that way? That has got to be more efficient for their legal team AND for website owners.
There has got to be a way to protect the rights of artists AND to not drive website owners, who are already scratching out a precarious existence in a world of ChatGPT and ad blockers, into bankruptcy. This route Dreamstime is taking, of individually sending website owners specific messages about every single image they have ever bought from DepositPhotos, seems enormously problematic.
That’s insane. If that happens to me, I’ll have to delete all the images. I didn’t keep track that well.
Not to stress you, but deleting images doesn’t actually solve the problem. If you violate an artist’s copyright you owe them the damages from that usage. Deleting the image doesn’t ‘undo’ the damages caused by the image being live up until that point. So Dreamstime would continue to pursue you for that alleged violation. From Dreamstime’s point of view, this is an endless free source of revenue, chasing down violators. Dreamstime probably has a stable of lawyers. They might as well have those lawyers work 24×7 earning money. Every violation is a source of revenue for them, and they have ample time to chase down every single person using every single image.
It’s probably more worth your time to log into whatever sites you used. Take it one site at a time – pace yourself. Each site should show a list of images you’ve downloaded. Just go one by one and make a list of image name / ID / artist name. If you need to, re-download the images into a folder named with that source name. So for example I keep a folder labelled ‘depositphotos’ and all my depositphotos images are in that one spot. That makes it easy for me to glance through that and find what I’m looking for.
That way you’re set going forward.
Good luck!