Image Copyright and Stock Photo Claims on Company Websites

Where the Images Came From, and Why Nobody Can Say

Every image on a company website is either licensed, created in-house under a documented arrangement, or an open exposure. Copyright attaches automatically on fixation — 17 U.S.C. 102(a) requires no notice or registration for the right to exist — and the right a web page engages is public display under 17 U.S.C. 106. A stock purchase is a licence, not a sale of the copyright.

Provenance then fails in recognisable ways: an agency supplied the file and its licence record was never shared; a slide a salesperson built became a hero banner; the media library has taken uploads from a dozen people since the last redesign; a coordinator searched for images and saved what looked right.

One point needs stating plainly: an image being reachable online has nothing to do with whether it is licensed. An image search engine indexes material published elsewhere, and its usage-rights filter reflects markup supplied by publishers — a filter, not a grant.

What a Stock Licence Grants, and What Royalty-Free Does Not Mean

Royalty-free means no further royalty is payable per use after the initial fee, for uses within the terms. They are typically non-exclusive, non-transferable and non-sublicensable, with hard limits: print runs, out-of-home impressions, production budgets, a defined number of seats, and exclusions for merchandise and redistributable templates.

Rights-managed licences are scoped per use, and the parameters are the licence: media, placement, territory, duration, print run, exclusivity, language. Running the image for a second year falls outside the grant.

Editorial use only is the most common stock error on B2B sites. It is confined to newsworthy or public-interest contexts because it usually lacks model or property releases and often shows trademarks, buildings or identifiable people. On a solutions page it invites claims that are not copyright claims at all: right of publicity, trademark, trade dress.

The label misleads. Royalty-free is not free of charge, not a transfer of copyright, not unlimited in seats, media or territory, not transferable to a client, affiliate or acquirer without express terms, and not exclusive. An agency's licence generally does not cover the client's use, and a subsidiary's does not extend to the parent. Extended licences cover uses the standard grant excludes, but buying one afterwards does not cure a use already made.

Creative Commons, Public Domain, and Free to Use

Creative Commons licences are copyright licences with conditions, and breaching one leaves the use unlicensed. All six licences in the 4.0 suite — CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND — require attribution, and three conditions get broken routinely. Attribution: an image with no credit and no licence link is out of compliance even under the most permissive licence in the suite. NonCommercial: Creative Commons defines it as not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage, which fits marketing pages poorly. ShareAlike: cropping a BY-SA image into a composite creates an adaptation that carries the licence forward.

The licence version matters, since only the 4.0 suite reinstates rights automatically where a breach is cured within 30 days. Public domain is a status rather than a synonym for free: 17 U.S.C. 105 covers works of the US federal government prepared by its officers and employees, not state, local or contractor works, and the status is jurisdictional. Free-stock sites operate under their own licences, which carry real restrictions.

Registration Is Not Required for Protection, but It Is Required to Sue

Copyright exists without registration. Filing a US infringement action generally does not: 17 U.S.C. 411(a) bars instituting a civil action on a United States work until preregistration or registration has been made, with a separate route where the Copyright Office refuses registration. The bar does not apply to foreign works.

The Supreme Court held in Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, decided 4 March 2019 and unanimous, that registration has been made when the Copyright Office acts on the application by granting or refusing it, not when the applicant files. The Court also stated that once registration issues the owner can recover for infringement occurring both before and after registration: the gate is procedural, not a cut-off on actionable conduct.

Under 17 U.S.C. 410(d) the effective date of registration relates back to the day the acceptable application, deposit and fee were all received, and that date is what the timing rule below turns on.

Statutory Damages and the Timing Rule in Section 412

Statutory damages are elected instead of actual damages and profits, and awarded per work infringed. Under 17 U.S.C. 504(c)(1) the ordinary range is not less than $750 and not more than $30,000 per work. Under 504(c)(2) a court may increase an award to not more than $150,000 for willful infringement, which the owner must prove, and may reduce the floor to not less than $200 where the infringer proves it was not aware and had no reason to believe its acts were infringing. Fees under 17 U.S.C. 505 are discretionary.

17 U.S.C. 412 then decides how much of that is available at all. No statutory damages and no attorney's fees may be awarded for infringement of an unpublished work commenced before the effective date of registration, or for infringement commenced after first publication and before that effective date, unless registration was made within three months after first publication.

Restated: unless the work was registered before the use began, or inside that three-month window, the claim is for actual damages and profits under 504(b), commonly the licence fee that should have been paid, with no fee shifting. Registering after discovering a use does not make statutory damages available for an infringement already commenced. The section limits remedies, not liability.

How Far Back a Claim Reaches

17 U.S.C. 507(b) requires a civil action to be commenced within three years after the claim accrued, and does not define accrual. It does not say whether a claim accrues when the infringing act occurs, or when the owner discovers, or reasonably should have discovered, the infringement.

The Supreme Court held in Warner Chappell Music, Inc. v. Nealy, decided 9 May 2024 by six votes to three, that the Copyright Act contains no separate three-year cap on damages: an owner with a timely claim may recover damages no matter when the infringement occurred. The three-year period is a filing deadline, not a damages window. The Court assumed, but did not decide, that the discovery rule governs accrual, and whether it is available at all under 507(b) remains undecided. An image placed on a site years ago and never removed is therefore not a stale exposure simply because it is old.

When a Letter Arrives, and What Can Actually Be Proved

Rights holders and their enforcement partners find uses through automated image matching — a perceptual fingerprint compared against images crawled from public pages — which catches files that have been resized, cropped or renamed. A typical letter asserts rights and an unlicensed use, and proposes a settlement figure with a deadline; some attach a registration number, many do not.

The useful first response is evidentiary rather than rhetorical. Is it the same image, compared against the licensed original rather than a thumbnail? Is there an invoice, a licence or download ID, a dated download record, and an account it came from? Was the use within scope — entity, seats, media, territory — and not an editorial-only file? When did the use begin, and when was the work registered, which is searchable in the Copyright Office public records? Removing the image is usually prudent; deleting the page and the logs is not.

That an agency selected the file does not by itself answer the claim, since infringement is a strict liability tort as to the direct infringer. What the relationship may give is a contractual indemnity, if one exists and the agency can pay, and evidence relevant to willfulness. Request its licence records in writing.

The Register That Prevents the Next One

Prevention here is unglamorous and it works. Every image traces to a document: a stock licence with an invoice and licence ID, a signed licence or assignment from a photographer, a recorded Creative Commons licence with its version and attribution, an internal creation record, or a documented public-domain basis. Keep that as a register keyed to the file as it sits in the media library, retire what cannot be traced, and configure image pipelines not to strip embedded rights metadata.

If It Becomes a Dispute

Once counsel is involved, the questions turn technical and dated. When did the image first appear on the site, on which pages, and what did those pages display on a given date? Which account uploaded the file, and does it match the claimant's original?

Answering that means reconstructing archived captures, revision and media library records, deployment history and server access logs, then explaining the reconstruction in terms a court can test. That is the work an expert witness is engaged to do. The constraint is timing: access logs rotate and revision histories are pruned on schedules measured in weeks, so the record that would date the start of the use is often gone before a complaint is filed. Preservation instructions issued when the letter arrives, rather than when proceedings begin, decide whether the question can be answered.

Frequently Asked Questions