But having said that I contacted one site in Indonesia. I didn’t really hope to get anything, but legally it’s important to be able to say that you always attempt to protect your copyright images from unlicenced use. It was a radio station and they were dead straight, apologised straight away and removed the image. Taking cash from Indonesia to the UK seemed a bad idea but I didn’t want to put a zero value on the use of my work either. So, really just for form’s sake I asked them to make a donation to a local charity.

To be honest I didn’t expect that they’d actually do it but it was an easy way to close the case. It really cheered me up a month later to get a postcard thanking me for my donation from a street kids rescue home!


One of David Hoffman’s images, used after licence expiry on the BBC website

Even after I’d discounted the foreign abuses and the clearly mad home users I was left with some very respectable and substantial sites. BBC Online – a notoriously tightfisted and unreliable bunch – had used five images for three years after their license had expired. A shipping insurance company had used one image for five years on their website and on print products. Three rather large charities had between them used 25 images for about four years. Over that period those charities had turned over well in excess of £30m between them. You’d have thought they could have paid for a few photos.

Blatant dishonesty?

One primary care trust had been using 13 images for a year. But it was Stoke Council who won the prize for blatant dishonesty. They had used had used eight of my pictures and as usual I wrote to them mentioning one. They immediately hid the other seven. They wrote back hedging about numbers and dates and so I wrote again pressing them. Their email says it all:

The email from Stoke Council admitting copyright infringement in the case of one photograph, stupid editing revealing that they knew they had in fact infringed copyright on several.

It seems pretty clear to me that Stoke Council were deliberately lying. They’d removed seven shots so they certainly knew they were there. Then they’d written an email referring to a number of pictures but didn’t even manage to edit that properly. I charged and got a 75% uplift on the usual rates for their blatant dishonesty. You think that was stupid? I just looked at the site again last week and – yes – they’ve nicked another one!