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Every day that goes by, those chances become greater.
Why?
Well, just as the new "digital" way of handling images is making it easier to steal photos, so, too, it is making it easier to find people who steal, especially if you are using photos on your website that you haven't paid for.
Images are being digitally encrypted in ways that you cannot detect. Then "spiders" are sent out to look for them, searching every corner of the Internet.
And guess what? That digital fingerprint stays with the image even if you only use part of it or change it substantially. If you're thinking, well, I'll just change this a bit, and alter this color and pretty soon no one will know where this image came from... think again.
If you are downloading photos, removing the watermarks, and then using them in printed pieces or even multi-media presentations, there are entities "along the way" who are empowered to check to see if you have purchased a legal license to use the images. People such as printers: More and more printers will not print your job unless you can provide them with proof that you have purchased the rights to use all the images in the project you have given them. No proof? You'd be surprised how many times we get calls from printers alerting us to projects they've been given where proper licenses for the images have not been secured.
Service bureaus replicating your multi-media presentations will check.
And bear something else in mind: If you read the previous section on penalties, you know that when a photo agency or photographer discovers an "infringement", the "recovery" (the amount of money they can extract from you) is very substantial. That means that they can hire a lot of people to do nothing but look for these infringements: They only have to find a few to pay for the effort. (This, indeed, is part of the intention of the law and the large penalties it provides for: To make it financially feasible for creators to spend the time and money to police the usage of their work.)
Put another way: If you are stealing images, you are on the wrong end of a whole system that is geared to prevent you from doing so.
Two reasons, one obvious, one less so:
The Obvious Reason: We make our living selling the rights to use our photos. It is our "stock and trade". If people use our images without paying for them, we go out of business.
The Less Obvious Reason: As mentioned right at the top of this document, the vast majority of our customers are great. They pay a fair price to use our images, respect the copyright on them, and act as creative professionals themselves. If they are competing against someone who is stealing our stock photos, it puts them at a disadvantage. Therefore, stealing is not only unfair to us, it is unfair to our good customers who pay us, and we have a desire and an obligation to protect them.
Which is exactly what we, and all other agencies are doing, with the support and help of governments throughout the world.
Are you going to get caught? Maybe you're faster, smarter and more clever than everybody else and you won't get caught. Maybe. But if you are caught, please refer to the previous section on penalties.
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