Pixsy.com alleging copyright infringement

[AndyJ]

Nice one, Gabe! I hope your bullish approach works. Good luck

[gsantos]

I have received an email from pixsy demanding payment of £700 for the unlicensed use of a photographer's picture on my aesthetics website. I actually found the picture on someone else's pinterest, and have the link to it.
As I have never had any experience with these sort of issues in the past, I am a bit unsure about what to do next.
I wonder if anyone could help?
kind regards
G.

[AndyJ]

Hi gsantos,

If you read through this and the other threads which discuss claims from Pixsy, and also those from PicRights and KodakOne which operate in much the same way, you should see how we advise you handle this claim. Unfortunately finding a picture anywhwere on the internet, including Pinterest, is no guarantee that the copyright owner has consented to it being copied. It may be that the use on Pinterest was being tolerated if the poster wasn't exploiting the image commercially, whereas your use may have been perceived as commercial exploitation.

[hughe]

Hi, I have also received a similar letter from Permission Machine and would appreciate any comments.

I have followed the other links provided by AndyJ and believe that my case falls into the hotlinking category. The webpage concerned curated an article from another site. By this I mean that I wrote an introductory paragraph and then included two or three paragraphs with images which I had copied from the other site. This was followed by a "Read More" with a link to the other site clearly indicating that it was their content. To be clear the only complaint is from Alamy for the image.

When I received the letter I checked the article and discovered that the image was linked from Alamy. I have removed the link so the image no longer appears.

My question is whether EU law still applies after Brexit so that I can claim the benefit of the two cases quoted?

[AndyJ]

Hi hughe,

Yes, all the decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union, prior to the date we left the EU (31 December 2020) will still be followed by the UK courts, and that includes all the cases I linked to previously. So if you are certain that the image(s) only appeared on your site due to a hot link, you are on safe ground. Provided that the source site where the image(s) were hosted was authorised to make them available to the public by the copyright owner, all acts of linking to them, whether through deep linking, framing or any similar technique, are legitimate.

And on that basis you can tell Permission Machine that they have made a mistake and should withdraw their claim. I suggest that you use the WayBack machine to obtain a complete copy of the code for your website from before you removed the links, as PM may well be relying on a screenshot, which of course will not show whether or not images were previously hosted locally or linked to. This is not essential but is highly advisable. If the case went to court and your defence was that the images were merely linked to, it would be up to the claimant to disprove this with evidence, such as that provided by the WayBack machine.

[hughe]

Hi AndyJ,

Many thanks for your reply which I have only just seen.

Unfortunately the Wayback Machine does not have a copy of the page concerned so I am exploring other ways to recover the deleted link code. In addition the "Read more" link to the other site now leads to a different page which does not include the offending image.

I will post again once I can recover the deleted code.

[hughe]

Hi AndyJ,

I have now managed to reconstruct my site from an xml file that I saved in 2018. This shows that the image was linked to the pictures folder of the other site. Although the image no longer appears on the article page, it is still in the pictures folder so presumably they must be satisfied that they are authorised to use it.

[stevedavies]

How did this turn out? Any possible update to share. Much thanks if you can.