Hi, my first post and please accept that I am not tec savvy. Back in 2011 I went on a night school course ( hobby type) to learn how to construct a very basic webpage using html ( notepad). This is not a business website - its just for fun and about my show dogs. Some sections are for individual dogs ( photos and pedigrees) and another section called “Latest News” is for annual blog type entries.
A few weeks ago I got an email from PicRights on behalf of P A Images saying I owed the £488 for unlicensed use of one of their images on my site. I checked through my site and saw in “Latest News 2015” an image of a house and resin driveway – an image I have never seen before. This image had replaced my original image of a dog although it was not the same size and obviously didn’t fit in with the general format of the page. The logo under the image remained correct (name of dog) As it was in the 2015 section it was not an area of the web page that I often looked at so wasn’t aware of this until I got the PicRights email. The worrying thing is that this house image is now in my working file on my PC ( replaced the dog image) although the name ( arrasbrum.jpeg) remains the same.
My web site is hosted by HeartInternet and uploaded by Classic FTP. I am the only one who has access to this and both are password protected. I have contacted Heart who say there is no trace of illegal activity and as far as they are concerned it was uploaded by me.
So I have 2 problems – PicRights want money and how has this happened? I have tried to do the reverse image search for more details but nothing comes up – just my website. Surely if it is a copyright image something should show?
Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
PicRights/P A Images
Re: PicRights/P A Images
Hi LindaP and welcome to the forum.
This is a strange problem which I don't think we've encountered here before. Since you are not tech savvy you may need some help from your hosting service Heart, in finding out what has gone on here. They can access the logs for your site and tell you when the image was uploaded. The second thing you could do is to use the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) to look for old copies of your site at various points since 2015. Being a small site, it is not guaranteed to have been archived, but it's worth a try. And thirdly, do you have a copy of the exact url for the image? Could it have been held on an external server and called up via hotlink? If this was the case, then anyone with access to that external server could have replaced the image there and provided that it had the same file name (as you say it does) then that would result in the house image appearing where the dog image previously appeared. If this is the situation then you would not be liable since the Court of Justice of the European Union has determined that hotlinking to material on an external site is not an infringing act even if the material is held on that distant site without permission.
Unfortunately without some forensic evidence to support your account, it is going to be difficult to back up your version of events, however strange it may be that an image which should have been of a dog, actually linked to an image of a house.
And whatever the outcome of your inquiries into how the image got on your site, the figure of £488 sounds totally unjustified, given your description of the image. Remember when dealing with these people that no part of what you may be required to pay in damages is intended to be a punishment or to cover some mythical business expenses that they will claim to have incurred in tracking down the use of this image. Even if you cannot prove that you are not responsible for this image appearing on your site, you would only be liable for the value of the genuine licence fee which the copyright owner has lost due to any infringement which may have occurred.
This is a strange problem which I don't think we've encountered here before. Since you are not tech savvy you may need some help from your hosting service Heart, in finding out what has gone on here. They can access the logs for your site and tell you when the image was uploaded. The second thing you could do is to use the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) to look for old copies of your site at various points since 2015. Being a small site, it is not guaranteed to have been archived, but it's worth a try. And thirdly, do you have a copy of the exact url for the image? Could it have been held on an external server and called up via hotlink? If this was the case, then anyone with access to that external server could have replaced the image there and provided that it had the same file name (as you say it does) then that would result in the house image appearing where the dog image previously appeared. If this is the situation then you would not be liable since the Court of Justice of the European Union has determined that hotlinking to material on an external site is not an infringing act even if the material is held on that distant site without permission.
Unfortunately without some forensic evidence to support your account, it is going to be difficult to back up your version of events, however strange it may be that an image which should have been of a dog, actually linked to an image of a house.
And whatever the outcome of your inquiries into how the image got on your site, the figure of £488 sounds totally unjustified, given your description of the image. Remember when dealing with these people that no part of what you may be required to pay in damages is intended to be a punishment or to cover some mythical business expenses that they will claim to have incurred in tracking down the use of this image. Even if you cannot prove that you are not responsible for this image appearing on your site, you would only be liable for the value of the genuine licence fee which the copyright owner has lost due to any infringement which may have occurred.
Advice or comment provided here is not and does not purport to be legal advice as defined by s.12 of Legal Services Act 2007
Re: PicRights/P A Images
Much appreciated that you have taken time and trouble to reply to my post.
I have already been in touch with Heart and they can only tell me when this image, arrasbrum.jpg ( along with many correct Images was uploaded ) I can also see this myself on classis FTP. But of course arrasbrum.jpg is now a picture of a house and drive, not an English Setter.
I have had a look at the web archive site you suggested. Very interesting if not complicated! My website is on there but results for the relevant page are for March, too early in 2015. The next entry is 2020 and on first looking photos were missing but now it shows the image of the house ( so I probably pressed the wrong button or something!)
However, from this archive website I was able to save a copy and by right clicking on that did get some info – it gave a date of 17/3/2020 and on checking in classic ftp that image ( labelled arrasbrum.jpg) unbeknown to me , along with several other correct dog images was uploaded by me on 6/10/2022.
I have taken a screen shot of what came up after right clicking. The image and some computer text . Is it acceptable to post a pic on here for you to see – it means nothing to me?
Final questions, if I can make no progress with how this has happened how do I go about negotiating to pay a reasonable copyright fee to Pic Rights. How do I find a copy of this image on the internet, and how does anyone know if an image is copyright. I always thought they had to have some logo or other.
Again, many thanks for your help and advice, LindaP
I have already been in touch with Heart and they can only tell me when this image, arrasbrum.jpg ( along with many correct Images was uploaded ) I can also see this myself on classis FTP. But of course arrasbrum.jpg is now a picture of a house and drive, not an English Setter.
I have had a look at the web archive site you suggested. Very interesting if not complicated! My website is on there but results for the relevant page are for March, too early in 2015. The next entry is 2020 and on first looking photos were missing but now it shows the image of the house ( so I probably pressed the wrong button or something!)
However, from this archive website I was able to save a copy and by right clicking on that did get some info – it gave a date of 17/3/2020 and on checking in classic ftp that image ( labelled arrasbrum.jpg) unbeknown to me , along with several other correct dog images was uploaded by me on 6/10/2022.
I have taken a screen shot of what came up after right clicking. The image and some computer text . Is it acceptable to post a pic on here for you to see – it means nothing to me?
Final questions, if I can make no progress with how this has happened how do I go about negotiating to pay a reasonable copyright fee to Pic Rights. How do I find a copy of this image on the internet, and how does anyone know if an image is copyright. I always thought they had to have some logo or other.
Again, many thanks for your help and advice, LindaP
Re: PicRights/P A Images
Hi Linda,
Well done with the research so far. Can you remember updating your site on 6/10/2022? Of course that still doesn't explain how the images came to be swapped, or how the house image appeared to have got on your own computer from which you updated the site.
The way to find the actual licence value for this image is, ideally, to find it on the PA Media or Alamy site. If that fails, as I assume it has, use google image search. To do that, open the main google page, and click on the search by image symbol at the right hand end of the search bar. Upload a copy of the house image into the appropriate search bar and see what results come back. You will get a large variety of possible images of houses and it's then a case of wading through to try to find the right one. If you do find the image, make a note of the URL and go there to see if it's a picture agency or just another site which is using that image. Hopefully if you do find another instance of the image the accompanying text will tell you more about it and why it was thought newsworthy enough to be on PA Media in the first place. This information in turn might give a clue as to its possible 'value' as a photograph. If, say, it's a picture of a house that featured in the news due to its owner being newsworthy, then the image may have had additional value at the time when it might have been sought after by newspapers and news media generally fior editorial use. However if the news story was several years ago, that extra value will have evaporated and the image is now just another stock image. This mean that, if you can't find a licence currently being offered for the exact image, you may be able to use the value of a licence for a comparable image of a house. This is likely to be in the tens of pounds.
And lastly, there is no legal requirement to place a notice on images for copyright to apply. All photographs taken by a human are entitled to copyright and that copyright lasts for the lifetime of the photographer plus 70 years after their death. From this you can see that virtually all photographs from the mid twentieth century up to today are likely to be protected by copyright. There is no way to disclaim copyright. The best a copyright owner can do is to apply a free licence such as Creative Commons and make it clear that they are making the image freely available. Even then some Creative Commons licences have certain limitations such as a requirement for attribution or no commercial use etc.
I hope this helps.
Well done with the research so far. Can you remember updating your site on 6/10/2022? Of course that still doesn't explain how the images came to be swapped, or how the house image appeared to have got on your own computer from which you updated the site.
The way to find the actual licence value for this image is, ideally, to find it on the PA Media or Alamy site. If that fails, as I assume it has, use google image search. To do that, open the main google page, and click on the search by image symbol at the right hand end of the search bar. Upload a copy of the house image into the appropriate search bar and see what results come back. You will get a large variety of possible images of houses and it's then a case of wading through to try to find the right one. If you do find the image, make a note of the URL and go there to see if it's a picture agency or just another site which is using that image. Hopefully if you do find another instance of the image the accompanying text will tell you more about it and why it was thought newsworthy enough to be on PA Media in the first place. This information in turn might give a clue as to its possible 'value' as a photograph. If, say, it's a picture of a house that featured in the news due to its owner being newsworthy, then the image may have had additional value at the time when it might have been sought after by newspapers and news media generally fior editorial use. However if the news story was several years ago, that extra value will have evaporated and the image is now just another stock image. This mean that, if you can't find a licence currently being offered for the exact image, you may be able to use the value of a licence for a comparable image of a house. This is likely to be in the tens of pounds.
And lastly, there is no legal requirement to place a notice on images for copyright to apply. All photographs taken by a human are entitled to copyright and that copyright lasts for the lifetime of the photographer plus 70 years after their death. From this you can see that virtually all photographs from the mid twentieth century up to today are likely to be protected by copyright. There is no way to disclaim copyright. The best a copyright owner can do is to apply a free licence such as Creative Commons and make it clear that they are making the image freely available. Even then some Creative Commons licences have certain limitations such as a requirement for attribution or no commercial use etc.
I hope this helps.
Advice or comment provided here is not and does not purport to be legal advice as defined by s.12 of Legal Services Act 2007
Re: PicRights/P A Images
Hi,
Used google search , only result for exact matches that comes up from this house image is my webpage . Similar results show houses and new driveways but on studying the image more closely it looks like police laying flowers so your suggestion that it was a news item was possibly correct. Looking on google search in the “ more about this page” ( 3 little vertical dots) shows correct dog picture saying version of this image is at least 10yrs old.
Somewhere when I was searching the archive website I found the image along with some computer text, but suppose this could be from my website – afraid that’s beyond me! <!DOCTYPE html> <html dir="ltr" lang="en" xm:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:web="http://schemas.live.com/Web/"> etc etc
If it is a stock image for PA images why is it not coming up on the google search?
Thanks for your continued help, LindaP
Used google search , only result for exact matches that comes up from this house image is my webpage . Similar results show houses and new driveways but on studying the image more closely it looks like police laying flowers so your suggestion that it was a news item was possibly correct. Looking on google search in the “ more about this page” ( 3 little vertical dots) shows correct dog picture saying version of this image is at least 10yrs old.
Somewhere when I was searching the archive website I found the image along with some computer text, but suppose this could be from my website – afraid that’s beyond me! <!DOCTYPE html> <html dir="ltr" lang="en" xm:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:web="http://schemas.live.com/Web/"> etc etc
If it is a stock image for PA images why is it not coming up on the google search?
Thanks for your continued help, LindaP
Re: PicRights/P A Images
Hi again Linda,
While it's obviously possible for two images to have the same name, what I can't figure out as how the two have become mixed up on your site.
I am also surprised that an image from PAMedia/Alamy should have the name 'arrasbrum.jpg'. This is not at all typical of their file-naming policy. It is interesting that you said in your first posting: "The worrying thing is that this house image is now in my working file on my PC (replaced the dog image) although the name ( arrasbrum.jpeg) remains the same" This rather that suggests somehow the house image got renamed while it was on your computer, rather than having that name originally.
As far as I can see the text which you found alongside the image is just part of the code for the site and doesn't help unravel the mystery.
As for why the image isn't coming up on google, I'm not sure, but it could indicate that it is no longer on the PAMedia site. Although if that is the case I would have expected it to still be on Alamy (a sister site to PAMedia). You could try the same search using another search engine called tineye.com. It is possible that tineye might use a different search algorithm and hence possibly turn up other copies of the image. You could also try bing.com.
While it's obviously possible for two images to have the same name, what I can't figure out as how the two have become mixed up on your site.
I am also surprised that an image from PAMedia/Alamy should have the name 'arrasbrum.jpg'. This is not at all typical of their file-naming policy. It is interesting that you said in your first posting: "The worrying thing is that this house image is now in my working file on my PC (replaced the dog image) although the name ( arrasbrum.jpeg) remains the same" This rather that suggests somehow the house image got renamed while it was on your computer, rather than having that name originally.
As far as I can see the text which you found alongside the image is just part of the code for the site and doesn't help unravel the mystery.
As for why the image isn't coming up on google, I'm not sure, but it could indicate that it is no longer on the PAMedia site. Although if that is the case I would have expected it to still be on Alamy (a sister site to PAMedia). You could try the same search using another search engine called tineye.com. It is possible that tineye might use a different search algorithm and hence possibly turn up other copies of the image. You could also try bing.com.
Advice or comment provided here is not and does not purport to be legal advice as defined by s.12 of Legal Services Act 2007
Re: PicRights/P A Images
Hi,
Well tried tinyeye and image came up immediately ( why didn’t it on google?) Anyway it relates to a murder in Essex in 2018, parents killed their children. Image is of their house with police laying flowers. This image was used by the national papers and BBC.
Yesterday tried repeatedly to contact alamy, by phone and email using contact details from their websites. Emails just keep getting returned and no one answers the phone. Did see from their site that the copyright licence for this image is £24.00. It also says on their website that this image is only available for editorial use so they probably wouldn’t sell it to me anyway?
Really don’t know what to do with this now – any more suggestions. Your help is much appreciated , LindaP
Well tried tinyeye and image came up immediately ( why didn’t it on google?) Anyway it relates to a murder in Essex in 2018, parents killed their children. Image is of their house with police laying flowers. This image was used by the national papers and BBC.
Yesterday tried repeatedly to contact alamy, by phone and email using contact details from their websites. Emails just keep getting returned and no one answers the phone. Did see from their site that the copyright licence for this image is £24.00. It also says on their website that this image is only available for editorial use so they probably wouldn’t sell it to me anyway?
Really don’t know what to do with this now – any more suggestions. Your help is much appreciated , LindaP
Re: PicRights/P A Images
Well done in finding the image's source. You can use the £24 licence as the basis of your counter offer because, had you actually wanted to use this particular image, it would have been in an editorial context on your dog website. The only reason Alamy say it is only available for editorial use is a bit technical. Advertsers and other commercial users of images usually require a licence which specifies that the owner of a property has given permission (known as a property release) for the image to be used. This avoids the problem of false endorsements, defamation or claims of infringement of human rights (Article 8) by property owners. When an image is being used editorially none of this matters.
Advice or comment provided here is not and does not purport to be legal advice as defined by s.12 of Legal Services Act 2007
Re: PicRights/P A Images
Hi, just wanted you to know that I have managed to win my battles with PicRights. As you know I had no help from PicRights so reported this to Action Fraud . Got a crime number from them and sent it to PicRights who just then sent me another email threating legal action if I didn’t pay the £488.
Nottingham Police picked up my report from Action Fraud and rang me to talk it through. From their investigations they thought it was website hack and not a computer blip, gave me a Nottm crime number and advised I contact PicRights again with their additional “crime number” to show they were taking it seriously.
They suggested the wording for the email - Following on from my previous emails I have confirmation from the police that they consider this to be a hacking incident and as I am a victim of crime and had no knowledge of this image I am not responsible for this fraudulent activity and consequently consider this matter closed. I will remove this image from my website. If you need further information the Nottingham Crime reference number is 2500023245.
Had a quick reply from PicRights - After further review of this matter, we wish to notify you that you may disregard the settlement presented to you. We have closed this matter. No further action is required on your part.
So quite a relief , really appreciate all your help with this. Thanks, Linda
Nottingham Police picked up my report from Action Fraud and rang me to talk it through. From their investigations they thought it was website hack and not a computer blip, gave me a Nottm crime number and advised I contact PicRights again with their additional “crime number” to show they were taking it seriously.
They suggested the wording for the email - Following on from my previous emails I have confirmation from the police that they consider this to be a hacking incident and as I am a victim of crime and had no knowledge of this image I am not responsible for this fraudulent activity and consequently consider this matter closed. I will remove this image from my website. If you need further information the Nottingham Crime reference number is 2500023245.
Had a quick reply from PicRights - After further review of this matter, we wish to notify you that you may disregard the settlement presented to you. We have closed this matter. No further action is required on your part.
So quite a relief , really appreciate all your help with this. Thanks, Linda