I once found one of my photographs on an escort agency's website.
Let me be clear about how, before anyone gets ideas. I was checking for people using my pictures without permission. I uploaded the photo to Google's reverse image search, which shows you everywhere that picture appears on the web. Anyone can do it, and it's free. One of the results was an escort agency.
I sent them an invoice, as I always do. They wrote back to say they couldn't pay, but they could offer me a night with the lady of my choice from their gallery.
I turned it down and passed the whole thing to my lawyer. They paid in the end.
That's the funny one. The rest are less funny and far more common. A global hotel chain used one of my pictures to sell the conference facilities at one of its London hotels. My work has turned up on recruitment websites, on estate agents' listings, and on more company Facebook pages than I can count. One picture won a prize in a camera club competition I'd never entered. At New Year, people have used my fireworks pictures to pretend to be me.
It has happened hundreds of times, and my image-search alerts keep finding more. So this is what I've learnt: what the law says, what I do when I find one, when it's worth chasing and when it isn't, and how to make it harder in the first place. It's for hobby photographers who've just found their picture on someone else's website, and for professionals who want their client agreements tied down.
I'm a photographer, not a lawyer. This is what UK law says and what has worked for me, not legal advice. If a lot of money is at stake, talk to a solicitor who specialises in intellectual property.
You don't need to copyright your photos
People often ask how to copyright their photos. In the UK, you don't need to do anything. Copyright in a photograph is automatic. There's no form to fill in, nothing to register and nothing to pay.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 lists photographs as artistic works, protected "irrespective of artistic quality" (section 4). Your holiday snap gets the same protection as a magazine cover.
The person who takes the picture is its author (section 9) and the first owner of the copyright (section 11). The main exception is work you take as part of your job: then your employer owns it, unless you've agreed otherwise (section 11(2)).
It lasts until 70 years after the end of the year the photographer dies (section 12).
The UK is one of more than 180 countries in the Berne Convention, which means they protect each other's work without any registration. So your picture is protected almost everywhere in the world. Whether you can do anything about it there is another matter, which I'll come to.
Finding a picture on Google doesn't make it free. Neither does the lack of a watermark.
What counts as stealing it
The Act gives the copyright owner the exclusive right to copy the work and to communicate it to the public (sections 16, 17 and 20). Downloading your photo and putting it on a website does both. Doing either without permission infringes your copyright.
A credit doesn't fix it. "Photo: Stewart Marsden" under a picture I haven't licensed is polite, but it's still infringement.
There are exceptions, known as fair dealing, and they're narrow. Copying for criticism or review, for quotation, or for teaching can be allowed if the use is genuinely fair and properly credited (sections 30 and 32). The exception for reporting the news specifically leaves out photographs (section 30(2)). A company using your picture to sell its services won't fit any of them.
"I didn't know" rarely helps either. Under section 97(1), a court can't award damages against someone who didn't know, and had no reason to believe, that the picture was protected by copyright at all. Not knowing who owned it is a different thing. Almost every photograph is protected, so it's a narrow escape, and even then the court can still order them to stop.
Collect the evidence before you say anything
The first thing I do is collect evidence, and I do it before I contact anyone. Email first and some will quietly take the picture down and say it was never there.
Here's what I save:
A screenshot of the page, with the web address showing.
The address of the image itself. In Chrome, press F12 to open the developer panel (right-click and Inspect also works, unless they've disabled right-click, which would be ironic). Find the image, open its address in a new tab, and screenshot that too, address and all.
A copy of the file they're using.
That file can tell you where they took it from. I size my pictures differently for each place I post them, so the width and height in pixels are different on my website, Facebook and X. If the copy on their site is the size I upload to Facebook, I can be fairly sure that's where they found it.
You can also ask the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to save a copy of the page. It's free, and it gives you a dated record that nobody can accuse you of editing.
Then show it's yours. I link to where the picture sits on my website. The original RAW file is strong proof too: my camera writes my copyright details into every one. Whoever took the picture only ever has the JPEG.
The first email
My subject line is simply: Copyright infringement.
The email says:
I own the copyright in the photograph, and they haven't acquired it legitimately.
Where it appears on their site, with links and my screenshots.
Where they can find it on my website, so they can see it's mine.
I've attached an invoice for commercial use, which they can pay easily by PayPal, within 14 days.
If they don't pay and I have to pursue it legally, the costs of doing that will be added to the bill.
Fourteen days happens to be what the courts consider reasonable. The government's guide to the small claims track for intellectual property says a straightforward claim letter should get a reply within 14 days. The same guide says your letter should set out the facts, what you want, and how you worked out any amount. It's worth doing properly, because if it ever reaches court, the judge will look at how both sides behaved before it got there.
If they don't respond within 14 days, they get a second, more strongly worded email saying I'll pursue it legally. If that's ignored, I send the details to my lawyer, who takes over.
For companies abroad, I translate the email first with Google Translate or an AI tool. I only really chase claims in English-speaking countries and Europe. More on why below.
Putting a price on it
The figure on my invoice depends on the picture and what it took to get it.
Say it's Tower Bridge, shot from the pavement where anyone could stand, with the camera I happened to have on me. I charge the standard stock price for their kind of use, plus an unauthorised use fee of 50% of that price.
If the picture took more to make, the price goes up. I look at what it cost me to get and what I'd have charged a client who commissioned it. Hired kit goes into that. So does exclusive access. Some of my fireworks pictures were taken from places where I'm the only person who's ever been allowed to shoot, so I'm literally the only person in the world with those pictures. That carries a premium.
So it varies. Sometimes the invoice is £100. Sometimes it's £2,000.
What a court would actually award
What you invoice and what a court would award aren't always the same, and it's worth knowing the difference before you threaten court.
UK courts usually start from what's called the user principle: the fee a willing photographer and a willing customer would have agreed for that use. If you normally license your work, your usual fee is the obvious guide. If you don't, you'll need evidence of what the use was worth.
On top of that, section 97(2) lets the court award additional damages, having regard in particular to "the flagrancy of the infringement" and "any benefit accruing to the defendant". That's at the judge's discretion. A surcharge like my 50% is a fair thing to ask for when you're settling, but a court won't add it automatically.
One case shows both halves of this. In Absolute Lofts v Artisan Home Improvements (2015), a loft conversion firm copied 21 of a rival's photographs onto its own website. The judge valued the licence at £300, guided by what the copier had paid a stock library for replacement pictures. Then he added £6,000 in additional damages, because the copying was flagrant.
Look at that £300. Even the court reached for the stock price. If your pictures are worth more than stock, the best evidence is what people have actually paid you, so keep your invoices and licences for similar uses.
If they ignore you
Once my lawyer is involved, the bill goes up, because he doesn't work for free. That's why I warn them about costs in both emails. He usually gets me some money. It can take several months, but all I had to do was send a few emails, so it's always worth doing.
If you don't have a lawyer, there's a court built for this. The Intellectual Property Enterprise Court has a small claims track for copyright claims worth up to £10,000, in England and Wales. It's designed for people who represent themselves, hearings can be held by video, and there's a free mediation service once a claim has been issued.
Court fees depend on what you're claiming. Issuing a claim worth £10,000 costs £455, with a hearing fee of up to £346 on top. Check the current fees on GOV.UK before you start.
The catch is legal costs. On the small claims track, the winner usually can't recover them. You get back court fees and some expenses, and up to £260 for legal advice if you asked the court to stop the use, but not your solicitor's bill. So "costs will be added" is a fair warning in an email, but if a small claim goes all the way, don't expect the other side to pay your lawyer. Bigger claims go on the court's multi-track, where damages can reach £500,000 and the loser can be ordered to pay up to £60,000 of the winner's costs.
I've sent infringers the link to the small claims court. I've never actually had to take anyone there.
Going to the host
Sometimes a company refuses to admit anything. It won't pay and it won't take the picture down. That's when I go over its head, to the company hosting its website.
A host stores a website's content for its customer. The law protects it for that, but only up to a point. Under regulation 19 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, a host isn't liable for what it stores while it doesn't know the content is unlawful. Once it does know, it keeps that protection only if it "acts expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the information".
So a clear notice changes things for them. I send the host a copyright notice with links to the infringing page, links to my work and my evidence that the picture is mine. On occasion, the host has taken the whole website offline.
To find the host, search for a "who is hosting this website" lookup and enter the site's address. If the site sits behind a service such as Cloudflare, that service's abuse form will usually pass your complaint on to the real host.
Many hosts are in the United States, where the notice is called a DMCA takedown notice and has to include certain statements, including that you believe in good faith the use isn't authorised. Two things to know. Your name and contact details are usually passed to the site owner. And they can file a counter-notice, after which the host may put the picture back unless you start legal action.
Social media and property portals
When my pictures turn up on a Facebook page, I use the platform's own copyright report form. Facebook and Instagram both have one, as do most other platforms. Instagram is upfront that, unlike most reports, intellectual property reports aren't anonymous, so expect the account holder to see your name.
Property portals are a muddle. The portal publishes the listing, but an estate agent or landlord uploaded the picture. In my experience the portal just takes it down when asked. If you want paying, the person to chase is whoever uploaded it.
Fake accounts and stolen prizes
New Year's Eve brings its own problem. My fireworks pictures get a lot of attention around then, because of where they were taken from and my work with the fireworks company that puts on the show. Some of that is image-sharing accounts reposting them and tagging me, which is just the way it is.
Then there are the Instagram accounts pretending to be me, offering fireworks shoots and using my pictures as publicity: some cowboy trying to get access to the views. A friend spotted one with my profile picture and everything. I reported it through Instagram's copyright form and had it taken down.
If it happens to you, Instagram also has a separate impersonation report, including a form for people who don't have an Instagram account, which asks for photo ID. Tell your followers which account is really yours. If anyone paid the fake account, they should report it to Report Fraud, the national service that replaced Action Fraud.
Competitions are another one. A member of a camera club took one of my pictures from my London portfolio, entered it in the club's competition and won a prize. I only found out because I saw it on the club's website. I rang the number on the site, spoke to the chairman and showed him my London portfolio, my website and my Flickr page. He took the picture down and said the club would expel the member.
If your work turns up in a competition you didn't enter, contact the organisers with your proof. A phone call can be quicker than an email.
When it isn't worth chasing
Photographs get used by companies all over the world, and you won't get paid for all of them.
Your copyright is protected in more than 180 countries, but enforcing it means using that country's courts and that country's lawyers. I don't chase a company in, say, Russia or the Philippines. A takedown request to the host can still work, depending on where the host is.
Then there's time. If I'm chasing £60 and the company is being unreasonable, it isn't worth it. That's when I cut my losses and go to the host. A claim worth a couple of thousand pounds is worth much more of my time and effort, and my lawyer's.
And sometimes I just let it go. I've found my pictures on students' websites, where they've been researching photographers they like and have written about me. That's kind of cool, and I leave it. The law may well be on their side anyway, since fair dealing for criticism, review or teaching can cover that kind of use when it's credited.
Recovery agencies
There are companies that exist to get photographers paid for stolen pictures. I'm not going to name any. Search for "photo copyright infringement recovery service" or "image copyright claim service" and you'll find several.
Most scan the web for your pictures, chase the infringers for you and keep a share of whatever they recover. Many work on a no win, no fee basis, and around half is a common cut.
I've used one. I didn't feel the photographer got a fair slice of the payout. They also work on standard rates, so my more exclusive pictures were undervalued, and costs like hired kit, which would go into a commission invoice, didn't count. Now my lawyer handles most of my claims. I still use the agency for an ordinary picture now and then, because all I have to do is press "submit case", and a year later I might get £50.
Before you sign up with one, check:
What share you keep, and whether that's before or after any legal costs.
Whether you can set your own fee for an image, or everything is priced at standard rates.
Which countries they cover, and whether they'll go to court.
Whether you can withdraw a case, and whether you can still chase infringers yourself.
How long cases usually take.
What a photograph is worth
Stock libraries have a one-size-fits-all price for every picture in their catalogue. That's fine for what it is, but it sets a precedent for what every photograph is worth. I've had people ask why they should pay £2,000 for a photograph of London when they could get one from a stock library for £30. They don't see the hidden costs of making photographs, or don't want to.
Imagine you hired a helicopter for a couple of hours to shoot London from the air. Would you upload those pictures to a stock library to sell at £20 each? Probably not, because that isn't an economically viable business plan. The helicopter has to be paid for somehow, or the business goes bust.
The same goes for hiring kit, buying kit, software subscriptions, storage and backups, and the cameras themselves, which are expensive. Photographers have bills to pay and still need to buy food.
That's why exclusivity goes into my prices, and why a stock price is the wrong yardstick for a picture nobody else could have taken.
Why a brand campaign does the most damage
I've seen my photographs on all sorts. Cups, jigsaw puzzles and canvas prints for sale on Amazon. Wallpaper websites offering them as free downloads. Those are bad enough.
The one that does real damage is a company using my picture in its branding.
Some of my work sells as rights-managed. Instead of a flat stock price, the buyer pays for a particular use: where the picture appears, for how long, and often the right to be the only one using it. That last part is the point. A business wants a picture that belongs to it, not one a competitor might be using next month.
Once a photograph becomes part of one organisation's identity, nobody else can really use it. No other company wants its brand to look like somebody else's. So I can't sell that picture to anyone else. The company that took it hasn't just had it for free. It has used up the picture's value for everyone else.
If it happens to you, price it as what it was: brand use, not a stock sale.
Being found without being taken
Photographers want their work to be seen, so we make it easy to find. That's also the problem. It shows up in Google Images, where people who don't know the law find it and take it.
Hiding your work isn't the answer. Make it easy to find, and make it obvious who owns it.
Alt text is a short written description attached to each image. Screen readers read it aloud for people who can't see the picture, and search engines use it to understand what the picture shows. Describe what's actually there. "Tower Bridge at dusk from the south bank of the Thames" does far more than "IMG_4471" or "London". In Squarespace, you add it in the image's settings.
Captions are the visible text under a picture. People read them, and search engines read the words around an image too, so a caption that says what and where helps the picture turn up in the right searches.
File names count as well. Rename the file before you upload it.
SEO, search engine optimisation, is the general name for all of this: making your pages easy for search engines to understand. Beyond images, it mostly means a page title that says what the page is about, and a meta description, the short summary that appears under your link in Google's results.
The part photographers miss is metadata. Google Images can read the creator, credit line and copyright notice from the IPTC information embedded in your file and show them next to the picture. Fill in the Web Statement of Rights field with a link to your licensing terms, and the Licensor URL with a link to how to buy a licence, and Google can show a "Licensable" badge on the picture. That tells everyone looking that it isn't free, and gives the honest ones a way to pay you. Google itself warns that stripping image metadata may be illegal in some places.
Protecting your pictures
Copyright exists by default, so none of this creates protection. It makes taking your pictures harder, and proving they're yours easier.
Metadata. My camera writes my copyright details into every RAW file, and I add them again in Lightroom to every picture. When you export, make sure the metadata setting keeps your copyright and contact details. Many social media sites strip some or all of it when you upload, which is another reason to keep your originals.
Your Flickr licence. Flickr lets you choose a licence for your photos, including Creative Commons licences that allow other people to reuse them. I set mine to All Rights Reserved. Check what yours is set to.
Watermarks. I gave up on them. People crop them out, or remove them with Photoshop or AI. The law does give you something here. Under section 296ZG, someone who knowingly removes "electronic rights management information" (details identifying the work, the photographer, the copyright owner or the terms of use) can be sued as if for infringement, if they know or have reason to believe that doing so helps cover up an infringement. Embedded metadata clearly counts. Whether a watermark burned into the picture counts is less certain.
A copyright notice on your website. I have one. It doesn't create any rights, but it takes away the "I didn't know" excuse.
Disable right-click. Squarespace has no setting to stop people right-clicking to save your pictures, so I added a little code to my site's header. Here's a version you can use. It blocks right-click and drag-to-save on images only, so visitors can still right-click links and copy text, and it should stop the long-press save menu on most phones.
<!-- Discourage casual saving of photographs -->
<style>
img {
-webkit-user-drag: none;
-webkit-touch-callout: none;
-webkit-user-select: none;
user-select: none;
}
</style>
<script>
(function () {
function onAnImage(e) {
var points = document.elementsFromPoint
? document.elementsFromPoint(e.clientX, e.clientY)
: [e.target];
for (var i = 0; i < points.length; i++) {
if (points[i].tagName === 'IMG') return true;
}
return false;
}
document.addEventListener('contextmenu', function (e) {
if (onAnImage(e)) e.preventDefault();
});
document.addEventListener('dragstart', function (e) {
if (e.target.tagName === 'IMG') e.preventDefault();
});
})();
</script>
To add it, open Squarespace's Code Injection panel (search for "code injection" in your site's settings) and paste it into the Header box. Code injection is only available on the Core, Plus and Advanced plans and some older plans, such as Business and Commerce.
Be realistic about what it does. Anyone can still take a screenshot, or dig the image out of the page's code. It stops the casual copier, and that's all it's for.
For professionals: tie down your usage agreements
Most of this post is about cleaning up after strangers. With clients, you can stop the argument before it starts by writing down who can do what.
Copyright stays with the photographer unless it's assigned, and an assignment "is not effective unless it is in writing signed by or on behalf of the assignor" (section 90(3)). Paying for a shoot doesn't buy the copyright. What the client gets is a licence: permission to use the pictures in the ways you've agreed.
So agree them, in writing. A usage agreement should cover:
Where the client can use the pictures: their website, social media, print, advertising, the press.
For how long, and in which countries.
Whether they can pass them on to anyone else, such as a magazine, a partner or their PR agency.
Whether they can sell them, sub-license them or put them on a stock library. Spell this one out. I've had clients upload my pictures to their own stock library accounts and sell them as their own.
How you should be credited.
On credit: your right to be named as the photographer (section 77) only applies once you've asserted it (section 78). Put a line in your agreement saying you assert your right to be identified as the author of the work. Once it's in writing and signed, it binds anyone it's been brought to the attention of.
Weddings and other private commissions have their own rule. Under section 85, someone who commissions photographs for private and domestic purposes has the right not to have them published or shown in public, even though you own the copyright. If you want to use a couple's pictures on your website or in your portfolio, get their permission in the contract.
You can see how I set out my own terms on my New Year's Eve fireworks booking page.
Quick answers
How long does copyright last on photos in the UK? Until 70 years after the end of the year the photographer dies.
Do I need to register my photos to copyright them? No. In the UK it's automatic and free, from the moment you take the picture.
Can I use a photo I found on Google? Not without the owner's permission, unless a narrow exception such as criticism or review applies. Being on Google doesn't make it free.
Can a company use my photo without permission? No. Using it to sell its products or services won't fit any of the fair dealing exceptions.
Is giving the photographer a credit enough? No. A credit is polite, but without a licence it's still infringement.
Can I sue someone for using my photo without permission? Yes. In England and Wales, claims worth up to £10,000 can go to the small claims track of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, which is built for people representing themselves. I've never had to go that far.
The picture at the top
The photograph at the top of this post is my most stolen image. It isn't on any stock library. The only way to buy it is as a print, so if you see it anywhere else, you'll know it's been taken.
One last thing I've noticed over the years. The websites using my pictures without permission have always had their own copyright notice at the bottom of the page.
I'm not a lawyer, and this post isn't legal advice. Fees and platform processes change, so check the official pages before you act.
