Website Developers Must Keep Good Records
Many people talk about copyright trolls. A copyright troll is a company that sends demand letters to people who are using items such as pictures, music, graphics and related items that they didn’t create, but now have ownership of. Copyright law exists to make sure that artists can profit from and control the use of their work. However, these “trolls” have likely paid the artist and are now trying to monetize the artist’s work. Websites are a common area where we find this issue. Website developers have to be careful when placing content on their clients’ sites.
Why does this matter? I get a fair number of clients who have received a demand letter from a company alleging that my client’s website uses a picture without authorization. These letters often request a payment in excess of $10,000. At this point, the story usually goes in one of two directions. The first direction is that the party did take an image from the web and paste it onto their website. Plain and simple, this is infringement. At this point the best I can typically do for my client is to negotiate a settlement. The other direction is that my client had the website professionally done, and the website developer had a license to use all the images placed on the website. In this case, all I need to do is produce the license and the problem should go away.
For The Website Developers in The Crowd
This paragraph is for the website developers in my audience. It is VERY IMPORTANT that you keep a record of all the licenses you use. One of your value-adds is that you are using only authorized images. This is worthless if you cannot prove it. One idea is to provide a copy of all the licenses to your client when you finish your website. Another idea is to keep all your licenses in case your client comes back to you years later. Either way, this should be a requirement for you if you sell the fact that all the content on the website you created is fully authorized.
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