Copyright infringement via Permission Machine, acting on behalf of Alamy

[Booster1]

HI, thought I would add a recent experience. Visual sent me their usual bluster and I responded with some of the advice on this thread. Basically offered them £150 which they accepted. I then didn't get around to paying for various reasons so waiting for their 'solicitors' to get in contact.

Has anyone actually been contacted by their solicitors and taken to court?

[Another victim]

I'll give you two guesses..

[Tomato]

I may or may not have received an email about copyright infringement from Visual Rights Group.

In my searching for information I came across this

"limitation period for bringing a copyright infringement claim in the UK" it's six years..

if the said image has been up longer they have no case. But I guess you have to prove it? Or do they have to prove it hasn't.

The letter I may have received by email has no street address on it. How can they get hold of me without an address?

[AndyJ]

If you received something by email, the sender doesn't need your street address to serve you with notice of his claim. However, if you mean, how can he find you actual address, that can be done by getting a court order which requires your ISP to provide your details, such as your real name and postal address.

And I'm afraid you've misunderstood what the statute of limitations means. The period of six years only starts once the alleged infringement has ended. In other words if you've had an infringing image on your website for the past 6 years and you only deleted it yesterday, the copyright owner has until 5 December 2028 to sue you if he chooses. In fact the period can sometimes be longer. If the copied image was concealed in some way, the claimant may be able to defer the start of the limitation period until the date he could reasonably have first became aware of the infringement.

[Tomato]

If you received something by email, the sender doesn't need your street address to serve you with notice of his claim. However, if you mean, how can he find you actual address, that can be done by getting a court order which requires your ISP to provide your details, such as your real name and postal address.

And I'm afraid you've misunderstood what the statute of limitations means. The period of six years only starts once the alleged infringement has ended. In other words if you've had an infringing image on your website for the past 6 years and you only deleted it yesterday, the copyright owner has until 5 December 2028 to sue you if he chooses. In fact the period can sometimes be longer. If the copied image was concealed in some way, the claimant may be able to defer the start of the limitation period until the date he could reasonably have first became aware of the infringement.

They have to prove I received a notice though surely? Email is not exactly reliable...

[AndyJ]

Yes under UK law it is not automatically assumed that delivery by email is effective in serving notice on a defendant where this has not previously been agreed to, but where there are no other means available, it is effectively the best means in the circumstances. If you reply then that is obviously taken to be evidence that you received the email and are effectively agreeing to continue to receive communications via email.
However, not replying also carries some risk that the claimant will go to court to obtain an order (known as a Norwich Pharmacal order) which can then be served on your ISP in order to get your postal address etc. Whether or not Permission Machine/Visual Rights Group would do this (since it involves extra expense) is a separate question, which I can't answer.

[Tomato]

Yes under UK law it is not automatically assumed that delivery by email is effective in serving notice on a defendant where this has not previously been agreed to, but where there are no other means available, it is effectively the best means in the circumstances. If you reply then that is obviously taken to be evidence that you received the email and are effectively agreeing to continue to receive communications via email.
However, not replying also carries some risk that the claimant will go to court to obtain an order (known as a Norwich Pharmacal order) which can then be served on your ISP in order to get your postal address etc. Whether or not Permission Machine/Visual Rights Group would do this (since it involves extra expense) is a separate question, which I can't answer.

I don't see it as a risk to not reply? If they need to do what they need to do to gain an address that is up to them? Could that cost of them getting an address be added to their costs handed down?

[Jamesjobie]

I’ve received emails from This company also regarding a picture on my website that I purchased about 6 years ago, when I sent them my invoice number they said I had purchased the wrong license , I had purchased personal not website the difference being £20 , I have since re purchased the correct license and due to this error they now want over £400 off me
What a scam of a company , I’m also confused as to why Alamy didn’t just contact me direct, I would of very happily have given the the extra money as it was a genuine mistake, why in the first instance do they feel like they need to go through another company who are scare mongers

[AndyJ]

Hi James,

This really highlights how pathetic this kind of operation has become that they need to chase people on the alleged grounds that the wrong licence was obtained. As you say, this is something that Alamy should have picked up and dealt with administratively.

I'm afraid I can't tell you why they use an outside aganecy instead of their own inhouse team to locate infringing images, but I imagine it may be to try and keep the disreputable and unsavory racket at arm's length from their core business. You can bet that Alamy don't do it for the benefit of their clients, the photographers who provide the images in the first place, who will see very little, if any, of the money generated by these business practices.

[Tomato]

I checked my visiter logs for my website. The email was sent 10 minutes after they first viewed the image. For this they charge over £200!

[ctrlz123]

I found this thread (and forum actually) doing my own research into these cowboys.

You might be interested to know that the way they "prove" that your website contained an infringement at any point in time is by triggering it to be archived on archive.today (which is a clone of archive.is, archive.vn, archive.md and others).

So not only do they have no in-house systems of their own (despite boasting "artificial intelligence" methods on their website), they enforce their claims using a site widely known to facilitate large-scale breach of copyright by scraping and duplicating entire websites on demand. It has such a poor reputation for respecting intellectual property rights that it has to constantly move its domain between countries (e.g. Moldova, Philippines, Vietnam) when its web hosting services are cancelled by hosting companies. It is regularly blocked by Cloudflare for its questionable DNS practices, summarily ignores takedown requests, and seems to use botnets (networks of hacked / malware-infected computers) to do its scraping gruntwork.

So essentially, in the name of extorting money from you for the couple of people that have seen some copyrighted image on your website, they are willing to breach YOUR copyright on a huge scale by duplicating it on a shady site that gets 2 million visitors per month.

[Another victim]

Their abhorent business breaches my copyright on all the other images on my website, in their attempt to extort money from me for allegedly breaching THEIR client's copyright? Hypocritical, much? And then uses possibly compromised computers to search for their images in the first place? Why am I not surprised? Honestly, I don't get it - why in the name of God does ANYONE pay them a frickin' penny once they've seen this website and the processes they use? I've repeatedly asked them to prove their case by showing me claims they've won, and they conveniently ignore it. Because of course they don't HAVE any judgements (well, ones that aren't automatically awarded because they've not been defended anyway). They don't sue anyone, it just isn't worth it even if they win, and once you've made them a Part 36 offer they'd be knackered anyway because their award would be lower than the licence fee plus a tenner for admin that you offered them. I'm only continuing correspondence with them for the entertainment value, and doing a public service by tying up 'Hannah's' time so she can't be emailing anyone else.

[Tefserf123]

Hi, all!

I thought I’d add my two pennies worth to this forum. I think I’m in the same situation as everyone else who have posted so far. I think I differ because I was contacted in December 2021 with the opening letter informing me of my infraction.

After reading on this forum and others, I immediately removed, defending image from our website and I emailed my reply asking for a breakdown of their costs. I didn’t get any reply at all and assumed the situation was over.

It seems in the meantime that they have been having ‘restructuring issues’!

Last week I received a new email and letter from the new company saying that because I haven’t replied to their original email and letter they were imposing a £20 late fee. Luckily I’d saved the original email and my reply so I forwarded onto them asking for the breakdown.

So I’m now in the situation where I’m waiting for a reply from them with a breakdown of costs which I’m assuming they will provide shortly.

My understanding of their business is they buy the debt from Alamy (or pay a fee to them to chasing up images that are protected using widely available online search tools - A similar practice how debt recovery agencies work)

My situation is, we paid a small commission to a small Internet web design company in Thailand to try adding a new blog to our website. The intention was to provide information on our local area in the hope that people would then book with our accommodation. In fairness to the company in Thailand, they used an image they found on the Internet and put a credit under the image indicating the copyright holder (photographer, not Alamy as they got the image from his website). The annoying part is that the image is of a scene I have looking out of my bedroom window!

While this is no defence on my part, I could argue that the blog was of an educational purpose, as there was no direct link to the accommodation other than the menu at the top of the screen.

As previously advised, I will ask “Hannah“ to accept a £35 license fee plus a 10% service charge in my reply to her coming email. When they reply to decline my offer, I will let them know that I feel my offer is fair in my situation and final and let them pass it to their legal team.

I have reports from my Internet service provider on monthly traffic to my website during the six months that the blog was up, including the offending image showing that the blog was an utter failure in attracting visitors (I’m not very good at SEO)

I do find it strange that they come up with such a huge figure, I would have thought a small fee would be more likely to encourage people to just pay it off and forget about it, then consider taking it to court!

I also find it interesting that if a YouTuber were to have copyrighted music in their clips, the copyright holder would contact YouTube and have it taken down rather than any legal follow-up like this. I would have thought Alamy would do to search themselves and find the offenders, and contact you if you haven’t purchased the right and at least ask for a subscription for it and give you a chance to remove it if not.

As a small business with a website in need of stock images I would now, after this experience, never consider using the Alamy service to obtain legal images – there are many more alternatives, who would not leave a bitter taste in my mouth! Very bad advertising!

I will reply if this goes any further, but if not, you can assume that they have not got back in touch with me…

[hughe]

In December 2021 I received a claim from Permission Machine which I mentioned in a post. Following info AndyJ helpfully provided I sent the following reply:

Hello,
We received your letter of 20 December regarding Alamy photo B3WAH3_9.
This image was not held on our site but was merely hyperlinked from another site and so there has been no infringement of copyright. Please update your records and confirm that the matter is closed.
Yours,
GardenPicsandTips

They responded:

Dear Garden Pics and Tips,
Thank you for your email and attention to this matter.
Our investigation team have confirmed that they could not find a hyperlink on the image when it was live on your website. Please see the page screenshot attached which shows our clients image being used on your website.
If the image was taken from a third party, you are required to seek permission from that third party for the use of the image.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Kind regards,
Hannah

I did not reply and heard nothing further until a few days ago when I received a reminder and an invoice for $320 with an extra $20 "to represent the increased level of damages". This came from Virtual Rights Group.
My reply:

Dear Christopher Vaughan,
Your letter dated 23/03/23 has been delivered today.
We have previously advised you that the image was merely hyperlinked from another site and your screenshot does not disprove this.
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we do not accept your claim.
Kind regards,
GardenPicsandTips

And their response:

Dear GardenPicsandTips,
Thank you for your email.
Regardless of whether the image was hyperlinked, you are still required to either license or receive permission to use the image in question. Whenever you place content of third parties (such as blog posts, product brochures, presentations, etc.) on your website, you are required to verify with the third party whether copyright has been cleared. You are responsible for all the material you put on your website, even when it has been supplied by a third party. You must do reasonable enquiries to establish that the person has a right to use the image before you agree to use it on your website.
Please can you provide proof that you received permission from a valid license holder to use our clients image on your website?
Without this information, we cannot close this case without a settlement payment.
If you do not wish to compensate our client, we will have to reluctantly escalate this matter to our solicitors to resolve.
Please let us know if you have any questions and how you wish to proceed.
Kind regards,
Hannah

Should I mention the two European Court judgements at this stage?

[AndyJ]

Who ever Hannah is, I suspect that 'she' has very little legal knowledge and is just following a script. Obviously a screenshot doesn't show a hyperlink so that comment in their earlier reply just demonstrates their ignorance. When they get to the point where they say they are going to hand the case over to their lawyers I think that will be the time to mention the CJEU cases. You should also send them an extract of the relevant part of the code on your website which set up the hyperlink. It might also be worth seeing if a copy of your site is held on the Wayback Machine for the period when the image was still there, and getting a copy of that code.
If your site is www.gardenpicsandtips.com, then I note that you already maintain an archive of old articles. However, taking a random example of the picture of snowdrops from 1 April 2019, I note that that particular image is stored on your own server and has the url: gardenpicsandtips.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/snowdrop-523667_640.jpg.
Assuming this is not the case with the disputed image, a copy of the relevant link is the sort of evidence which would convince a lawyer who knows his IP law to drop the claim.