Panic Stations! Lawsuit threat for using an image

Must I pay?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

A couple of years ago I was offering websites built with a commercial shopping cart. As far as I can remember at this time I used a thumbnail size shopping cart icon from one of their sites. I no longer offer this cart but the image was still used twice on my site basically because I forgot to remove it. I appreciate that I should not have used it in the first place but I did.

This morning I received a letter from a solicitors in London sent on behalf of Corbis and demanding that I pay £2,385.25 for the use of this image. This is clearly an extortionate amount for a small icon. They say it is to cover the period from Dec 2005 to Dec 2006 and that I can pay more if I want to use it beyond this date.

They also say that if I do not pay by 18 December they will instruct their client to commence legal proceedings against me ... seek legal costs, etc. They make reference to "English Law" but I am based in Scotland where we have a separate legal system. I obviously extremely worried because this is a lot of money to me and I don't know where I stand on this.

Has anyone else been in this situation? Must I pay?

I would very much appreciate any advice.

Edited: Spelling

[edited by: BeeDeeDubbleU at 12:39 pm (utc) on Dec. 7, 2006]

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

For anyone watching this I have nothing further to report as yet.

[simonuk]

A friend was also contacted by them so I'm watching this thread closely for him.

Please keep us updated :-)

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

There is another thread running in the UK FSB website if he is interested.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Another two weeks gone by and still no action to report.

[Syzygy]

I anticipate that they'll have long forgotten about you by now, BDW, and moved on to more obliging pickings ;-)

Syzygy

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Well I hope so and it looks that way. I am just so annoyed that I let this upset me so much over the Xmas period.

Naivete!

[potentialgeek]

Lawyers are notoriously heavy-handed in their threats. They are designed precisely to scare the living daylights out of you.

Some of these firms may have image tracking software based on invisible (read: embedded) watermarks. So they simply put their bot to work scouring the net; next there's a comparison with client records; then the (automated) threats go out.

p/g

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Actually a company called Picscout does their dirty work for them. Apparently their disobey the Robots tag and spend an inordinate amount of time and bandwidht on your site scanniong for images.

[cmarshall]

You may find this [webmasterworld.com] thread interesting.

I think that bandwidth theft by sniffer robots may be a big problem as well.

In my case, I'm a graphic artist, and I do all my own artwork. When I do it, I keep all the original files around.

When I use a CMS, I never use their artwork in my public (non-admin) spaces; preferring to design my own themes.

When I do a site for someone else, I insist that they set up a policy to enforce provenance discovery for all images, including rendered fonts.