due diligence re: graphics?
Hey Warriors,
This has happened to us a couple of times over the years:
- Hire someone to do some graphic design work.
- Designer uses some clipart as part of the project.
- Design is good, we use it.
- Sometime later, some company claiming to "own" the original art for part of the design sends us a letter claiming we owe them thousands of dollars. (No DMCA complaint or notice, and no prior request to remove graphic.)
What I'm wondering is:
1. Has anyone encountered this tactic of threaten-lawsuit-first, ask-questions-later-method of trying to extract money, and how did you handle it?
2. Is there any method one can use, once receiving an outsourced design, if it has any images to which you can't claim usage rights?
3. What steps have you taken to protect yourself from this kind of thing when outsourcing design work? When managing 1000's of pages/sites/images, seems fairly difficult from a marketer's standpoint to really do all the due diligence necessary to ensure one has the right to use every single piece of clipart a designer might use in a design.
Also, the designers we've used would typically be people we'd trust to make sure that we actually have usage rights on things, so it's not really a matter of using cut-rate third world designers who don't know or don't care about the usage rights on the graphics they are using. FWIW.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Matt
This has happened to us a couple of times over the years:
- Hire someone to do some graphic design work.
- Designer uses some clipart as part of the project.
- Design is good, we use it.
- Sometime later, some company claiming to "own" the original art for part of the design sends us a letter claiming we owe them thousands of dollars. (No DMCA complaint or notice, and no prior request to remove graphic.)
What I'm wondering is:
1. Has anyone encountered this tactic of threaten-lawsuit-first, ask-questions-later-method of trying to extract money, and how did you handle it?
2. Is there any method one can use, once receiving an outsourced design, if it has any images to which you can't claim usage rights?
3. What steps have you taken to protect yourself from this kind of thing when outsourcing design work? When managing 1000's of pages/sites/images, seems fairly difficult from a marketer's standpoint to really do all the due diligence necessary to ensure one has the right to use every single piece of clipart a designer might use in a design.
Also, the designers we've used would typically be people we'd trust to make sure that we actually have usage rights on things, so it's not really a matter of using cut-rate third world designers who don't know or don't care about the usage rights on the graphics they are using. FWIW.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Matt
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