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The absence of established avenues of compensation or effective and affordable tracking technology has led to greater numbers of freelance photographers and journalists having to trawl the web for illegal uses of their material.

The results, however, can be rewarding. Photographer David Hoffman claims to have made £27,000 from a single night's work chasing his images across the internet.

Hoffman painstakingly tracked down sites that had breached his copyright by publishing his images without his permission.

Although handsomely rewarded for his efforts, his experience is one repeated across the industry as widespread copyright breaches - carried out by a range of perpetrators from publishers and charities to blogs - affect freelance writers and photographers alike.

"There was more stuff being used illegally than there was legally I could actually turn away all my paid work. So I decided to have a blitz on it," Hoffman told Journalism.co.uk.

The problem, he says, is not a misunderstanding of copyright law by online publishers, but 'a deliberate effort not to understand'.

Despite claiming to have another £20-30,000 worth of cases yet to be followed up, he says it's a problem exacerbated by a lack of a financial punishment when online infringers are caught.

"The law is a mess: if you're publishing nicked pictures and you're caught, the worst that will happen is you'll have to pay what you would have paid had you done a deal with the copyright owners in the first place. You don't pay anything extra."

In a recent change to procedure the court service has ruled that copyright claims must now go through the patents court - a process that requires legal representation and therefore effectively prevents individuals from resolving cases of copyright infringement on their own.

A perception of online journalistic content as 'free for all' and the lack of a standardised payment system for copy and images reproduced in digital editions only deepens the problem.

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has tried to establish 'uplift fees' for the republication of material, but it's a recommendation widely ignored.

Nick McGowan Lowe, moderator for Editorial Photographers UK (EPUK), says these rates are 'largely aspirational', infrequently adopted and do little to deter publishers from breaking the law.

"At the moment, if a publisher sees a picture in front of them and thinks 'should I contact the copyright holder or should I just chance it?', the chance it option wins every time," he said.

"If someone has a high res file and is determined to use it maliciously, the whole method of licensing and copyrighting is largely based on trust and the remedies can only come after the infringement."

Not only do freelancers have the added problem of chasing online use of their content, but the burden of pursuing copyright breaches falls entirely on the victim of the infringement.

"Almost every publisher in the country knows this and takes the piss," says Tim Ireland, whose design mocking the London Olympics logo was lifted from design website B3ta.com by Zoo magazine.

While using Google Images to track photos can bring some returns, more advanced technology used by larger agencies in copyright claims is too expensive for individuals.

Yet, as Hoffman suggests, tracking online copyright abuses could provide a new revenue stream for freelancers.

"All of us would much rather be going out, making new pictures and selling them. But rates are going down repeatedly, so the option of pursuing people who've stolen pictures becomes much more interesting," he said.

However, some freelancers may be reluctant to pursue additional copyright claims for fear of burning bridges with publishers who offer them regular work or because of the time and financial effort required to track online breaches.

Lawrence Shaw, new media representative for the NUJ, suggests a more radical solution: give online publishers permission to use only low res images.

"You use higher resolution for any print version, but use a lower res online. Therefore if anyone wants to buy this picture to use it, you can provide a link back to the photographer's own site.

"A lot of people will say that's not realistic, but the reality is that the internet is here and if we don't face that reality we're going to be in trouble."

Shaw's idea may deter 'casual lifters' of images looking for a higher quality, but he also believes the problem could be curbed by the unsustainable business model of online publishers that rely on using copy for free.

"Websites are starting to make money. If you properly resource and fund a good news operation online, it proves you can make money from it.

"If they don't resource those websites properly, staff them properly and commission freelancers properly to provide for those websites, it's shortsighted," he said.

Until then, our interviewees offer some advice for journalists and photographers:

• Photographers: always watermark your images - but don't ruin the original by doing so

• If material is ever used without permission, issue an invoice and chase, chase, chase

• Blog the details of your exchange to keep everyone honest - take a look at  how Tim Ireland did this on his blog
  

• Photographers: make sure images are captioned, use meta-data and meta-tagging to prove ownership of photos

• Photographers: search Google images with key words to locate your photos and keep screen grabs of where they've been used

(Read other articles in Journalism.co.uk online copyright series)

Tags (click tag to find related articles; click icon for feed):
freelance | nuj | copyright | photographers | digital images | david hoffman | epuk | tim ireland | zoo magazine | lawrence shaw |

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