Over the past few years, our community has expressed frustration with new websites that have been popping up and taking advantage of their work. These sites have been guilty of:
Duplicating Unsplash’s library (by mass scraping and crawling) and redistributing their work, often times without credit, and without their consent.
Creating fake accounts for them with their name and personal information, without permission.
Selling their work, including selling their work as prints or printed on physical goods, without their consent.
Failing to remove their work from their sites, even after contributors have requested a take-down.
Re-distributing their content under incorrect licenses, causing confusion for everyone.
These are all also direct violations of Unsplash’s Terms of Service and the Unsplash License. We purposefully created the Unsplash License and our Terms in a way that do not allow mass compiling or selling of Unsplash photos, because of the harm and confusion it created for our community. We shared more about this here.
If you find your work (or another Unsplash contributor’s work) being distributed or sold on another site without consent, you have the absolute right to have it removed. Here are a few steps we recommend taking to help have your work taken down:
Steps:
Contact the website. Find the email address of the website (it’s usually in the About section and it could be a general email), and contact them. Here’s a useful template you can use:
Hey,I’m John Appleton, and this email serves as a statement that:I am the exclusive owner for this photo {link to photo on Unsplash}. These exclusive rights are being violated as this photo is being made available on your site for download {link to photo on website}. I have good faith to believe that the use of this photo in such a fashion is not authorized by the copyright holder (me), or by law.I state that the information contained in this email is accurate, and I am authorized to act on behalf of this. I may be contacted by the following methods {share email, telephone number, or whichever you prefer}.I request that you remove this photo from your website, and disable any access to it, immediately.Regards,John Appleton
Contacting these websites or having your work taken down should not cost you anything. If these sites are asking you for money to have your work removed, let Unsplash know (support@unsplash.com). We’d be glad to get involved and help.
If your work is found on the following sites, here’s the most efficient way to have your work taken down:
Shutterstock: email compliance@shutterstock.com and cc support@unsplash.com. By cc/ing us, we can help followup to make sure that your work is taken down in a timely fashion.
Society6: send a message through this contact form. If you haven’t heard back from Society6 in a reasonable timeframe, contact support@unsplash.com or fill out this form.
2. Ask Unsplash for help. If you haven’t been able to have your work taken down after contacting these sites, we would love to help. You can fill out this form by including as much detail as possible. The more details you can share, the better. We will work on having the content removed, and keep you updated along the way.
If you have any questions around copyright, the Unsplash License, and legal usage of Unsplash photos, you can contact support@unsplash.com.