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What I Learned After Receiving My First Cease and Desist Letter
And how it ultimately propelled me to success later in life
In 2013, I received a cease and desist request from Getty Images. The letter was targeted at my meager personal blog. I was just twenty years old at the time, and I had ambitiously and foolishly put Google Ad Sense on my website, thinking that people were reading my material (but they weren’t). I thought that having a few dozen regular visitors entitled me to make some money off of their questionable choice in online content. The ads made me feel proud at the time, and I thought I was mere months away from making it big. I wasn’t.
The presence of ads failed to make me any measurable money. I learned that a few hundred views on a post would net me a couple of cents in revenue. Instead, the ads attracted the eye and the ire of Getty Images, one of the largest image holders in the world. Instead of a net positive, the ads were about to become a major negative.
I had unwisely used copyrighted images by mistake. I naively thought that any image that appeared on Google was fair game to use in my work. That is absolutely not the case.
The letter demanded that I take a series of images down. I immediately complied. But the messages didn’t stop there. Even after I removed…
