.@BBCr4today Please correct your reporting - we don’t have ‘fair use’ in the UK, we have ‘fair dealing’ exceptions to copyright law. There’s a difference and it’s important to be accurate in what you say so the lines are not blurred @AssocPhoto @BBCNews

In other words - The rights owner sets the value of their work, not the infringer. Subject to certain caveats, eg: Having already issued licenses for similar fees, or having a publicly displayed price list. Figures can't be made up on a whim - they have to be demonstrable.

"We only pay £50 for photos as we have a deal with a stock library." It doesn't matter what you'd pay for any _other_ image. The reasonable royalty is what the copyright owner would be able to achieve from anyone willing to license the image in the claim, not any other image.

A common reaction of people who infringe our client's © is to try to devalue the work by saying things like "there are better images available for free" etc. It doesn't help as a defence though since it only shows there was no reason to use our client's work in the first place.

BANDS/PUBLICATIONS: saving images from Google or photographer’s socials doesn’t mean you own them and can upload and advertise with freely. Please stop.

…Oral arguments for Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith are scheduled for Oct 12.…

When you send an invoice you limit yourself to how much you can recover should you take the claim to court for copyright infringement - depriving yourself of any claim to additional damages (which have previously been awarded as much as 500% on top of actual damages). 4/4

there is no debt to chase - the invoice is not enforceable as there is no contract or supply of service. You should treat it for what it is - a copyright infringement, not a sale. Another caveat of sending an invoice is the limitation of damages.... 3/4

An invoice is a demand for payment for the supply of service or as part of a contract. When someone uses your photo without permission, there has been no supply of service - you didn't provide anything and so there no contract. So if you send an invoice and they don't pay, 2/4

So - why shouldn't you send an invoice to someone who used your photo without permission? Lets explain... 1/4

We do sometimes wonder if its the same intern going from internship to internship randomly grabbing the first photos from Google rather than licensing images legally.

A common reason given when discussing an infringement is "The Intern did it"... Regardless of the ethics of using unsupervised interns for critical business activities like handling your website or social media, you are still liable for their actions if they infringe copyright.

Two more copyright infringement claims settled recently on behalf of our clients, including one against a police constabulary and another against a luxury fashion accessory manufacturer. 👮‍♂️👜 #copyright #intellectualproperty

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I hope I’m not tempting fate here but our website is back up and running now and the Distributed Denial of Service attack has subsided. 🤞🏼

Our web servers are currently experiencing an on-going DDOS attack that started last night and lasted a few hours, and has resumed again this morning. We apologise for the slow response (if any) from our website while this attack is underway.

i.e. If the rights owner normally licenses their work for, among other things, this particular use, then you can not claim it is fair dealing just to avoid paying a license fee.

One of our recent cases involved a photograph used in a TV documentary. The infringement was defended as 'fair dealing' (a common attempt at defence). Fair Dealing can NOT be fair dealing if it interferes with the normal commercial exploitation of the work by the rights owner...

We have a new Social Media presence and a new website which hopefully makes it easy for copyright owners to get paid for the unlawful use of their images! Take a look -