Blogging and Pictures #MondayBlogs

Have you read about Living For Naptime blogger Chrystie's recent post titled, "Blogging Mistakes to Avoid"? If you haven't, it's here

In a nutshell, Chrystie normally uses her own pictures on her blog, but she ended up turning to Google a couple of times. For this particular incident, she went to Google to find a picture of a green pepper. That picture was copyrighted and the photographer sent her a C&D order via his/her attorney. After Chrystie diligently took it down, she was then slapped with a $7200 fine for damages.

I'm also guilty of going to Google for the occasional photo, or more specifically an animated gifs--because they crack me up and make my posts pop. I naively, and wrongly, assumed, if I accidentally used a copyrighted photo, a C&D would be the end result, as I'm not using the photo/gif for promotion or making money off it.

Well, I'm wrong!

Normally I set my google search for royalty free pictures, but am not confident I did this for all my photos, nor that the Google search was correct with its results. I'm not going to risk it! I've reverted all my previous posts to DRAFT, and will have to painstakingly go through the 200+ posts and check for any pics and remove the ones I find, regardless if they're royalty free or not, because I'm not going to bother checking that detail (as it will take waaaaay too much time).

That's not really what my post today is about...It's about the irony.

The green pepper photographer priced his photo at $750, and sued for $7200 of damages after a C&D was diligently and promptly followed.

How is it possible, in our current society, a book priced at $4.99 that took months (or years) to complete, can be plunked on a pirating site, and when the site is issued a C&D for the books, they take it down and that's it? No suing for damages or lost income. No slap on the wrist. But a picture of a green pepper, that cost little to produce in money and editing time (the camera is probably pricey, but so is my laptop, so I'm ignoring price of technology), gets this distinction?

Am I the only one scratching my head?!?

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