SuperStock.com get heavy over stolen images

SuperStock isn’t a site I’d visited before but they appear to be one of the bigger stock photography companies on the web. Right now I’m following a case where a guy used one of their images without permission (or paying, I’d guess). The image has been removed but he also checked online to see if he was doing the right thing. Unsurprisingly he didn’t get much sympathy.

I have a friend who takes beautiful amateur photos and makes a modest income on the sales through stock photography companies (and has done so since before the web) and I know that would be disappointed at someone profiting from his work without paying for the rights to the images.

The flip side to the coin is that web users get so used to having an enormous cache of images, templates, scripts etc at their disposal that we forget that sometimes they’re not free. Just because we know how to work around the right mouse blockers, the images embedded in the CSS etc doesn’t make it right to do so.

Personally I think it’s great that SuperStock is protecting it’s photographers and suppliers. They do, however, need to balance justice against the potential PR nightmare of hounding a site owner.

More: Digital image copyright – Demand for payment

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