A few employers in the past few months have reported receiving a legal notice from Getty Images: a stock photopraphy website, that (according to Wikipedia) aggressively pursues copyright violators). In the notices Getty Images claimed that the work they received from their workers was unlicensed and demanded thousands of dollars to license it.
To employers:
Before releasing funds to a worker for an image, we strongly recommend doing a scan to make sure the image is truly custom. This can be done broadly (with some work) at free resources (such as Google Images). Or it can be done faster and more comprehensively (but with a small cost) through a company such as Picscout. By the way, I have approached Picscount's business development team to see if we could get some sort of special volume/rate for our users and I am waiting to hear back from them. If anyone knows of a competing product that is also good, please share it by posting it here.
To workers:
All work that you produce for employers must be your own. Copyright may or may not be a serious issue in the country you live in, but it is in the United States (as you can see from the above). If you give an employer something that is not your original work, not only will you lose the arbitration and the funds for the projeect, but your account will be closed for copyright fraud and you will no longer be able to work on the site. Please don't let this happen to you, and simply make sure to always use your own work only. If you are unsure of the authorship of an image, do not take a chance...don't use it.
For more information on copyright, please see your vWorker legal agreement:
http://www.vworker.com/RentACoder/misc/Legal.asp
Ian Ippolito
CEO of vWorker
