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Copyright and unauthorised use of our original
content
You can contact us here.
Months of hard work over a period of ten years, have gone into the making
of this site. However, some businesses, organisations and individuals believe
it is OK to steal our original material. Others do it through ignorance of the
copyright laws.
In the last year or two this has included a well-known estate agent, several bed
and breakfasts and even a local authority run tourist website.
We aren't talking about a small text extract that is quoted as part of a genuine
review and with a credit and link back to us. These are people who lift several
paragraphs in full, hundreds of words, entire articles, photographs or videos
and republish them without payment or credit, passing off the material as their
own work.
This damages our business and website. Having our content duplicated on other
sites harms our ranking with the search engines, as they penalise sites that have
the same content. In the case of photographs it impacts on potential future sales.
We will pursue anyone who steals our content. This will include a complaint to
the web hosting company concerned.
We may then issue an invoice to cover use up to the time the content is removed.
This is typically for two or three times our normal one-use fee, plus a charge
for each letter or email we have to send.
Non-payment after 30 days will be pursued through the Small Claims Court (for
amounts of up to £5000). Where it will be an open and shut case. There is
no defence: the content was used and has to be paid for.
The internet is not anonymous. Duplicates can be found in seconds using free tools
such as Copyscape or
with a simple search for a sentence on Google (which also indexes photographs).
LINKS
The Guardian Technology section reports on a taxi firm that received
a £1,300 bill for unauthorised use of photographs and two other small
businesses that were charged more than £2,000.
The article concludes:
'For anyone running a website the message is clear: you are responsible for
everything that appears on your site. You should assume that every picture or
graphic must be paid for unless you can prove otherwise.'
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