Getty Images wants license payments for Awkward Penguin!
Our little blog project Geeksisters is once again having problems with copyrights. The reason for this is, of all things, the extremely well-known meme "Socially Awkward Penguin" :O Three years ago we had a few variants of it in this blogpost and of course, with such a well-known and widespread meme, we didn't even remotely expect it to be problematic in any way. Then, at the end of April, we received a letter from Getty ImagesFirst of all, they simply wrote that they had noticed that we were using licensed images on our website and that we should please contact Getty "to determine an active license for use". Attached was a copy of our blog post and the original image of the penguin. So we contacted Getty by email and received the answer that we should pay 785.40 EUR license fees for the use of the penguin. If you are interested in the exact wording of the email from Getty:
785.40 EUR is a hefty fee, but at least they were fair enough not to involve a lawyer, so there are no additional fees for that. By the way, you can find the picture in the Getty catalog here and if you use the license calculator offered there, you get 460 Canadian dollars for a 3-year use on a commercial blog (which you can't really call Geeksisters, but at least it's run by a company - namely us), which is about 308 EUR. A lot cheaper, but a doubling of license fees is quite normal in such cases.
However, the Awkward Penguin is not just any picture that we simply stole from Getty, but one of the most famous memes on the Internet. Of course, this immediately raises the question of why quite obviously nobody knows that the rights to the penguin used there are owned by a photo agency that sends out invoices for its use. There is information about which photographer took the photo of the penguin, but nothing about Getty or even demands for license payments.
The answer to this question should become clear after a few more emails with Getty: As the legal situation seems relatively clear, we agreed to pay the amount demanded and of course we deleted the images. However, Getty then made it clear to us that we had to keep quiet about the whole thing, otherwise they would hand it over to their lawyers :O
We then informed them that we would not agree to confidential treatment, but would gladly accept the rest (including payment of the money). However, this is obviously out of the question for Getty, as they only repeated in response that an agreement was not possible and that the matter would then be passed on to their lawyers. So this is presumably the reason why you can't find anything about the whole thing on the internet so far:
Getty is simply ensuring that those affected do not report on the case by threatening to involve lawyersbut prefer to pay the amount demanded in silence! Apparently quite a successful strategy, but of course we don't get involved in such things. Actually should one think, that by now it is well known that you can't get anywhere with something like this, but of course it's not that easy to deal with every blogger in detail, is it? :D
We have of course paid the license fee anyway, the images have been deleted as I said and we have also made a legally binding declaration to Getty that we will never again post the well-known Socially Awkward Penguin. Otherwise, we are now waiting for mail from Getty's lawyers. We will of course keep you informed of the outcome.
We put the graphic under public domain, which means you can simply use this replacement for the meme without any risk :) You can find the Awkward file for editing here as PNG and the Awesome file here as PNG. We have also uploaded it to the Memegenerator: Awkward and Awesome and again in the hybrid version. Have fun creating memes without the "warning" risk :)
Update 3.9., 7:29 am: There is no "public domain" in Germany. We place the images under the CC0 license. Thanks to the commentators for the hint!