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Comment by Gud | Hacker News Reader

Sorry I don’t understand, how are they the bad guy in your scenario?

Presumably an online business should follow copyright law?

Yes, they're not the bad guys for making people respect their copyright (there have also been cases where Getty re-licensed public domain images and threatened people in similar ways, but that's a different matter).

Assuming they're the legitimate copyright holders, the shady part is increasing the price of the image on their website to make you pay more than what you should as soon as they notice the infringement - and threatening legal actions if you don't pay the image price

They're not saying they're the bad guys

“shady”

They seem to be claiming the image in this case got bumped up to the highest price tier only because there was a C&D notice.

Exactly - the price of that particular image switched to a higher tier just because they found a copyright infringement. This is the shady part. Back then I recall reading other threads about people in very similar situations. Unfortunately I'm not able to find those threads anymore, but I've found a Reddit post mentioning that Getty stopped with these shady practices when their CEO changed.

Edit: found something similar to what I mean [1], [2]

[1]: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/625-De...

[2]: https://ryanhealy.com/getty-images-extortion-letter/

You could think of it as, it was bumped up to a higher tier because there is evidence that out of all their millions of stock photos, someone chose this one.

That would make sense if this was done _after_ they estimate the infringement price that they present in the C&D - which AFAIK wasn't the case

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