Hey guys,
While I've learnt over my short time in AM that the best thing to do is "Just test it" in order receive an answer unique to the specific situation, this time I wouldnt take such a risk... quite yet. Without the sound advice of the mods here.
Heres the scenario;
I've done alot of digging to find the creatives I want to use to build my angles around. I've found the exact "type" of female in the exact physical pose and doing what I want her to do to match my headlines. The problem is; I've found these creatives on a highly niched paid members site. The site disclaimer regarding copyrighted material mentions that any violation of their copyright laws will result in criminal penalty.
I wanted to photoshop them a bit so the content is not exactly the same, but the issue remains the same; The models are the models and they may be protecting them.
So to everyone whos succesfully run in adult, have you ever used niched copyrighted material on banners and landing pages and gotten away with it?
Any one with a law suit?
Im gunning for every competitive advantage I can find, and in this case I have a feeling these creatives would be a competitive advantage due to the fact that I see no one running creatives like this and their highly targetted.
Or I could be wrong, and it could be that the same bland "Better than fuckbook", "Snapbang", and "Instafuck" angles just do better.
What do you guys think.
In case you hit a really high profile model, you MIGHT get in trouble. However, usually it starts with a removal request, it's not like they will sue you for millions straight away ... this would be a copyright infringement case, those can get expensive, but there is only so much damage you can do by "stealing" 1 picture so even the possible "fines" have their limits. The most important part here, do not even touch the image if the model looks too young.
On a side note, usually it's not needed to "target" this much ... it's true that image is extremely important, but it's more about the type of the women, not the exact pose she's in.
Do you have a decent budget for this campaign?
If you're willing to spend a bit of cash, there's a quick legal workaround - contact the model and ask her to pose for you. Hire a photographer local to her, and bingo - images that are all your own.
This will probably, unless she's really quite famous, cost a lot less than you'd expect. Some negotiation might get you the images for a couple of hundred dollars.
If it's the niche that you're going for specifically, you could also look for other models in that niche and see if they have photo shoots they'd be willing to sell. That may drop your costs a lot more.
(Hiring models is something that most people just won't do, because it's waaay outside the Google Images comfort zone - but it's not actually that hard or expensive. In fact it can be free if you're a decent photographer or can find one, don't need anything too hardcore, and hire locally.)
I'd base my campaign on as little risk as possible and would go with @caurmen's suggestion.
You don't want to build up a successful campaign and then get in all sorts of trouble.
As for some background information on the legal use of images, have a look here (and specifically look at the "moral rights" section at the bottom)