This is a heads up for anyone with a website.

Getty Images are cracking down on anyone who is using their images on a website without the relevent copyrights. It seems they are invoicing about £2000 per image.

They are using an Israeli company who use some nifty technology to scour the web checking website images.

A number of people who have been billed a frightening amount of money did not know that they were using copyrighted images - especially after they had paid a professional web design company to make their website for them!

If you have any images on your website that you absolutely cannot prove that you own or are genuinely copyright free, you would do well to remove them.

A websearch on both google and google groups turns up quite a good number of horror stories and "support groups" for those threatened with legal action by Getty.

Fotolia is a useful site for finding legal-to-use images. They have a nice selection, and it's usually only £1 to use one on your website.

Another good option is istockphoto

iStockPhoto.com -- owned by Getty -- has millions of high quality photos priced between $1 and $15. It's Getty for the rest of us. It has saved my publishing business thousands over using Getty images in the past three years. Highly recommended.

Hi All,

Thanks to Andrew for the heads up and to everyone for the good advice!

To add to that, I'd also say that if you're using photos released under the Creative Commons licence, keep track of the original image and licence information and make sure you follow the specifics of the licence re: attribution, commercial use, etc. You might one day be glad you did!

Be Well,

Michael Perez