A couple months ago, I started watching the TV series Bones on hulu. I wanted to see what it was about and after watching the first few episodes, I decided I liked it and ended up watching all four seasons. After I finished watching the last episode, I wanted to see if FOX had any extras on their website about the show so I went there to check out their website.

I went to the Recap page to see if I had missed any episodes and what did I find on the left hand side of the web page? I saw an image of a handgun that was taken from a stock photography site and never paid for! For those of you that don't know, when an image is taken illegally from a stock photo site, it usually has a watermark of some kind on it. In this case, I have highlighted the watermark on the gun image (taken from FOX's site) to the right so you can see.

Now as a web designer/programmer myself, I understand that this is something that could happen to anyone. It's normal to use a stolen stock photo for a design mock up and then after the design is approved, you buy the real one. Sometimes people forget to buy the real one and this happens. The irony of this whole thing is the fact that FOX, along with every other major TV station, goes into a hissy whenever someone else "steals" their copyrighted material on places like youtube or other video sites.

I think because FOX gets so pissed about this kind of stuff, the stock photo company that they took this from (It looks like istockphoto.com) should sue them for a bunch of money. Stick it to the man!