Brad Hubbard writes “One of my favorite sites, AwkwardStockPhotos.com received a legal nastygram claiming that by showing the stock photos from iStockPhoto.com (and linking back, with watermark in place), they were violating copyright. What they were actually doing was driving tens of thousands of hits directly to the iStockPhoto site, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that they increased the number of purchases of these otherwise humorously bad photos.
Sounds to me like these are all perfect Fair Use examples, being stomped by a company that didn’t like how its product was being used. That makes me sad, but it’s the way things are in the world of harsh ownership.”
The blog, if you didn’t know, basically found awkward stock photo images, but did so in a very promotional way, linking back to the original, and always including the original watermark. In other words, it was helping to advertise some rather unique iStockPhoto images — and as the site notes, lots of other sites have done the same — and even received book deals for it. It seems like iStock’s parent company, Getty Images, totally overreacted to a site that was only helping them, and not harming the company at all.
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