If you breach our copyright expect a letter like this !

Infringement of our Copyright Images (Theft of Intellectual Property Rights)

It has come to our attention that you have used one or more of our photographic images on your website or other website, without our consent.

Under international (Bern convention), UK (including the "Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998"), US, and other national laws, you are not permitted to copy any original work of art including photographs which are subject to copyright without the copyright holders consent.

Please note that prohibition from copying images includes using derived and modified versions of images, inter alia because the modification itself entails copying. Any comments we make about images includes modified images.

Please cease using any and all of our copyright images immediately, and desist from using them in the future.

As copyright owners we do on occasion license other parties to use our images for specified purposes subject to receipt of suitable fees, and the use of copyright notices. It is not our habit to license our images for use in competition with our own business.

We are entitled to damages from you in respect of loss of fees for your unauthorised use of our images, even if you have now removed the images or your auction has been removed. As a guide £600 per image is a typical fee we are able to charge, but our claim against you is not limited to this amount.

Because you have used our images in a manner which competes with our own business, this may have reduced our profits by reducing the prices we are able to obtain for our own similar items, or by stopping our items from selling or reaching our minimum price.

We are also entitled to request from you an account of any profits or benefits you have derived from the unauthorised use of our images, and to pay us the amount of your profit or benefit. We hereby request that you provide such account and make the appropriate payment to us.

We are entitled to, and do, hold you responsible for any and all costs we incur in obtaining satisfaction against you, including administrative fees and legal costs.

We may have already given notice to ebay or your ISP about your infringement, and reserve the right to do in future.

We request that you provide us within seven days with a written undertaking that you will not use any of our copyright images in the future,

We request that you provide us within seven days with your account of all profits or benefits as mentioned above, including all previous uses of our images.

We request that you forward to us within seven days your offer to cover all the above-mentioned profits, costs, and losses, and enclose a sterling cheque or make a transfer to our bank account. On receipt of this offer and payment, we will consider your offer, and at our absolute discretion, decide whether to accept it.

If we do not consider your offer acceptable, or if you fail to make an offer within the time, we will pass this matter to our legal advisors with instructions to enforce your compliance with our rights, including compensation.

We may also need to obtain a court injunction against you, which will involve you in substantial legal costs.

Please note that many countries can and do apply a range of statutory damages, in the USA for example up to $150,000 per item / infringement.

Use of our images may also have the effect of making your items appear similar to ours, or to give the impression that you are associated with us, licensed by us, or in some other way endorsed by us. It is also possible that any similarity may result in an action for passing off, for which we may have similar or other remedies available to us against you.

If you are in any doubt about which of our image or images you have used, it follows that you must have used images from a variety of sources, in which case you almost certainly have infringed the copyrights of others. It is not our responsibility to identify each and every image to you, or to provide proof of our ownership of the rights to the images. If you insist on us providing you with copies or the locations of each original, we retain the right to charge you an administrative fee.

We have invested a considerable amount of money to equip ourselves with high quality professional photographic equipment, lighting equipment, computer equipment, and computer software, in order to be able to capture high quality professional photographic images. We have also invested considerable amounts of time in training and education to enable us to produce high quality results, and invested much time in the taking, recording, and processing of our images.

It is with much anger and frustration that we note almost daily theft of our copyright material by private individuals and companies alike. You may consider your own infringement to be marginal or harmless. We can assure you that we see it as part of a larger and more serious problem. We are determined that theft of our copyright material will not go unpunished, and will seek appropriate compensation from any and all unauthorised users of our images or other copyright material, and this will include punitive as well as actual damages.

If you have not already provided us with your name address and full contact details, please ensure that you do so immediately. If we have to obtain this information from ebay, your ISP or elsewhere, we reserve the right to charge you an administrative fee.

We reserve the right to seek any and all other remedies against you.

None of the above should be taken to limit or prejudice any of our rights.

If you in any doubt about any of the above, we suggest you consult a legal advisor.

A partial list of our websites can be found via the following link:-

Ignorance is No Defence
Ignorance of the law is no defence. Most people when caught in a transgression immediately plead ignorance, whether it be copyright theft, speeding, or other offence. We suspect that most people know when they have offended, but are devious enough to try to lie their way out of any penalty. Others have a strategy of pre-emptive counter attack, and get really nasty (it would probably be more accurate to say that their inherent nastiness comes to the surface), and threaten us with legal action or compaints to eBay about us for trying to protect and enforce our rights. We can assure you that when people get nasty with us, it makes us more resolved to extract a penalty from them.