Verifying Licensed Images, Fonts & Video

Unlicensed media is one of the most automated legal risks a website faces. Agencies like Getty Images and PicRights run crawlers that fingerprint images across the web and generate demand letters — tens of thousands a year, typically $750–$5,000 per image, with follow-ups escalating toward the statutory ceiling of $150,000 for a willfully-infringed registered work. You don't have to be big to get caught; you just need one photo you can't prove you licensed.

What actually creates exposure

• Stock images pulled from a search engine "because they came up free."
• Photos a former designer or agency added, with no license on file.
• "Royalty-free" images used outside the license terms (e.g., a comp/preview used in production).
• Fonts embedded or self-hosted without a web-embedding license.
• Video or music dropped into a background without sync/usage rights.
• AI-generated images — provenance and licensing here are genuinely unsettled; treat as needing documentation, not assumed safe.

How to verify and document (do this proactively)

• Inventory every asset — image, font, video, audio — on the site.
• Match each to a license you can produce: the receipt, the license PDF, the stock-library account showing the download, or proof you created it.
• Keep the proof somewhere durable: a simple spreadsheet of asset → source → license → date.
• Publish a short image-credits / licensing page linked in the footer. It documents good faith and makes an audit trivial.
• Replace anything you can't verify — with a licensed asset, an owned original, or a properly-attributed public-domain/Creative-Commons file (check the exact terms). Do this before a letter arrives.

If a letter comes

Don't ignore it (silence escalates the demand) and don't just pay reflexively — the claim's validity, registration status, and amount all matter, and this is a moment to get advice.

Sources

• PicDefense (Getty guide)
• Heitner Legal (PicRights playbook 2026)
• McNees Law (copyright-troll demand letters)
• Harper James (PicRights response)