I tend to live a very safe and low risk
lifestyle, always following the rules and avoiding dangerous or risky
situations. I work from home and rarely go out which also minimizes
the chances of ever running into a bad situation. Because of these
reasons, I would never expect to find myself in any sort of trouble.
However one time recently I did manage to get into some trouble as
you will see.
So my main job involves working in
sales and customer service for a large company that sells products online.
A little while after working there I got the idea to start my own
website related to the company to help promote the products and bring
attention to the new items released each day. I figured there were
not really any websites or blogs doing this for this company so it
might be a niche market to explore.
I started my website and slowly built
it up trying to write a new article each day. I figured after a
while I might be able to join an affiliate program and generate a
little income by promoting the products. I also figured if I got
enough traffic, I might be able to make some money with ads on the
website.
Over the months the website started to
gain traction and get a decent amount of traffic. Then one day I was
contacted by the legal team at the company. I had been using images
from the company website to help promote the products on my blog. I
don't think they had a problem with most of the images but at the
time I had used some images that apparently they did not want
published yet. They had accidentally published them already which is
where I got them in the first place, but then they unpublished them
and wanted me to do the same.
Of course I complied and took the
images down immediately and actually unpublished my website until I
got confirmation from the company on what was ok and not ok to use.
Still before I even had a chance to reply to them, they contacted my
website host and then the host contacted me telling me I had to send
them all my information.
Overall I was pretty worried. I didn't
know what kind of trouble I had gotten myself into. I was just trying
to make a website to help promote the products for the company and
now it looked like they were trying to sue me for using images from
their website.
So I replied to them and
explained the whole situation letting them know I had removed the
images and was willing to take down my site or modify it as needed in
order to comply with whatever was required.
Luckily they were understanding and
seemed to be ok with it since I was cooperative and took down the
images as requested. I was able to keep writing articles on the
website but I no longer use any images for the articles just to be on
the safe side. Thankfully the
issue was resolved without any serious trouble.
My site however did take a hit from the
whole situation. I lost a lot of traffic by having to unpublish it
for a while and take down all the images. I did continue to keep
working on it and with time the traffic came back. This situation
turned out ok, but it shows you can get into trouble pretty much
anywhere even without even leaving the comfort of your own home!
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