It was a lot of work, all very tedious, writing letters, arguing, threatening, repeating the same things again and again, refusing to haggle. The sentence “I cannot accept that copyright infringement can ever be a cheaper route to publication than licenced use.” is now hard wired into my brain.

It’s really important to ensure that you have a full record of all the evidence you can gather before approaching the publisher – It’s amazing that someone who has absolutely no idea that any of your images are on their site can find and remove every single one in just a couple of minutes.

Who owns the website ?

Another tool that some of you will know about is whois – if not just Google it. This shows who owns a website and gives a second line of investigation if the contact addresses on the site itself don’t work.

It’s much easier to track down abuse on the web than in print but Amazon gives us one nice tool that’s worth mentioning. They have scanned a lot of the books they sell and you can search the text inside. While writing this I had a quick trawl for ‘cannabis’ and found a book from a publisher that I have previously found using my photos without getting round to mentioning the fact. There are three photo credits to me. I’ve never licenced the use. It’s nice to be credited. It’ll be nicer still when they pay up.

Only after you have amassed all the evidence that you can think of should you approach the publisher. If there is more than one image I’ve found it best to only mention that I’ve seen one and not let on that I know how long it’s been online. It is very useful to be able to judge how honest and open the site owner is at an early stage. My initial approach is very gentle and bland, I just mention that I can’t find a record of a licence for the use and ask them to let me know the terms of the licence they have. If they come clean at that point I can expect an easy ride. If not then I can give them every opportunity to stitch themselves up thoroughly before I start to shake them down.

I think that photographers are losing far more money than we realise, maybe we’re losing more than we make. The infringements we find can only be a tiny proportion of what is being used behind our backs. Following up these abuses can take significant time from what we want to be doing – taking photos.

Frustrating and depressing

It can be frustrating and depressing and sometimes difficult to know how to proceed. The NUJ can offer little help, the once reliable “legal service” has crumbled to dust when I and many others have tried to make use of it; and while our freelance organiser is a rock he is very limited by the union in what he can do. Thompsons, the union lawyers, have proved in my own experience to be generally useless and, even worse, I’ve seen them wreck a potentially winnable case. I’ve now had had two complaints against them for poor service upheld.

Thompsons’ own copyright expert can give helpful advice on a specific query but that help is generally limited to two hours and it can be surprising just how little that provides. The union’s deal with Thompsons gives no ongoing legal support for copyright matters.