from Hacker News

Ask HN: False advertising on stock vector websites?

by mehrzad on 11/30/20, 7:28 PM with 1 comments

I've noticed that a lot of services that sell royalty-free non-exclusive licenses to stock vectors and other images have a lot of images like this: https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/letter-m-c-logo-icon-design-template-elements-vector-21949358 even though on almost all of these services there is a huge clause saying that the use of the image in a logo is explicitly not allowed. When the image itself is suggesting the customer use it as a logo, is this not highly misleading? What am I missing here?

  • by rshnotsecure on 11/30/20, 7:44 PM

    They could be making the money back on Ad Fraud. Perhaps the images and files they provide contain some kind of tracking script. It's easy to imagine giving someone some JS code to paste in instead of a simple image link.

    Also this could be just simple fraud. Freely acquiring others IP at no cost, and then almost giving it away because your Cost of Goods Sold is something close to $0.00.