Copyright, again...

A friend of a friend just published this on Facebook, so it's in the public domain

"The Royal Courts of Justice are indeed quite an intimidating place...up for judgement were basically three issues;
Was publication without prior permission a breach of my rights?
Was ignoring a watermark and meta data a flagrant breach of my rights?
Did the publication prejudice my rights to sell exclusive to a third party?
I can report that the answer on all three points was an emphatic 'Yes' from the judge.
An award for damages on each point has been made and costs awarded against the defendant.
Naturally I am happy, but I do feel a certain amount of regret that it came to this. The watermark was there to remind others the image required prior permission...I went out of my way to avoid this kind of mess but ended up in the very place I did not want to go."

A very quick update, his court case which was decided yesterday which he pursued against a blogger/hobby use of his image where they ignored his watermark - the court doubled the damages in his favour because of that (and trebled them because it affected his first use of the image). Actually cropping off the watermark would also be derogatory treatment of the image and likely to multiply damages even more. All of which assumes of course that you find out about the theft/cropping.

Thanks for the tip on this one. Somewhat still a Catch 22 situation. The hoops togs need to go through nowadays.

The hoops are actually far more simpler now we have the copyright and patents court.

Its a shame more of these cases aren't reported by the media so bloggers and other media outlets became more aware of their obligations to copyright holders who seem to think they can breach copyright at will with no consequences.

Good to see the courts multiplying damages for the circumnavigating copyright i.e cropping off watermarks.

I have always put a small modest copyright on my online……images via Lightroom, my argument has always been, for the image to be used, you have to remove it by cropping....... Therefore the person stealing the image has to acknowledge they are at fault, no excuses.
Good to see the Royal Courts of Justice applying simple common sense.