The home care marketing specialists at MOST are here to help ensure your agency prevents copyright infringement issues.

Your agency’s website should, of course, contain professionally written, useful content, a user friendly navigation, and eye-catching images. But are those images of happy caregivers and seniors YOUR property, or are you at risk for copyright infringement?

Our home care marketing specialists have the information you need to prevent this potentially serious problem:

• Ensure that the marketing agency you hired to create your website purchased the images for your site.
• Know that when an agency buys images for your website, the images are then the property of the purchasing agency – not your home care agency. Permission is typically granted to use the images to create your website only – not for re-use for other purposes.
• U.S. copyright laws state that a photo is the property of the person who actually takes the picture – not the person who owns the camera, or even the person in the picture, unless there is a specific written agreement in place.

To make things even more challenging, there are currently spam emails from supposed “professional photographers” circulating. These messages may appear to be legitimate and can instill fear, but there are some key ways to distinguish them from actual copyright infringement notices:

• A true copyright infringement notice will include proof that the sender owns the copyright to the image.
• Spam notifications will often include a link to a Google Drive document or another source. NEVER click on this link!

The best course of action if you receive any kind of notification about potential copyright infringement is to contact the agency from whom you received the image in question. You need to respond to the photographer or the attorney who sent the infringement complaint with a receipt for the purchased image, or if this isn’t available, confirmation that the infringing content has been removed from your website.

The home care marketing specialists at MOST ensure that all images used are legally purchased and licensed for use on our clients’ websites. Contact us for more information at 800.370.6580.