Hello!

I am not a photographer, I am a blogger and I recently discovered that taking Creative Commons pictures from Flickr wasn't that safe since there is not guarantee that the picture really is creative commons.

So I looked for a stock photography site, and found out that most of them don't guarantee that the pictures are legal to use. For example I checked Bigstockphoto and according to their terms of use, they are not responsible if I get sued after buying a picture there and using it as intended by the licence.

As a publisher this is a huge problem. The reason I want to buy stock pictures is precisely to pay photographers and avoid any copyright infringement. The fact they don't guarantee the legality of the pictures they sell is strange. And I am surprised it doesn't bother people.

I only found three stock photo providers who do, Istockphoto, Shutterstock and Vivozoom.

 I don't want to use Istockphoto because it belongs to Getty and this company has practices that I hate.

Shutterstock seems nice, but they also offer an extended legal protection. Does it mean the basic one isn't sufficient?

Vivozoom seems dead.

I wasn't familiar with this industry before. And honestly, what I find confuses me a lot. What these websites do is basically selling pictures without checking whether the person they pay really owns the picture. It seems very amateur.

But as I said I am new to this, so i may have misunderstood something.