Small businesses rely on third party web designers or images that are advertised as free to use on "free domain" sites for their websites. Now several stock photo houses are using a crawler to find these images and send demand letters to the website owner for thousands of dollars as well as threatening to sue them. They claim they have no record of purchase and that they own the image in question. Many times the website designer has moved on, or the image taken from a free domain site was not marked as copyrighted leaving the website owner facing a problem created by others. We believe that a "cease and desist" letter should be sufficient for the truly "innocent infringer."
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