Copyright Guides

Suggested Remedies for Copyright Claims 

If you have been directed here then it is most likely that it has come to our attention that you have used one or more of our photographic images on your website or eBay auction, without our consent. Under international (Bern convention), UK (including the "Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998"), US, and other national laws, you are not permitted to copy any original work of art including photographs which are subject to copyright without the copyright holders' consent. Please note that prohibition from copying images includes using derived and modified versions of images, inter alia because the modification itself entails copying. Any comments we make about images include modified images. Please cease using any and all of our copyright images immediately, and desist from using them in the future.

We are entitled to damages from you in respect of loss of fees for your unauthorised use of our images, even if you have now removed the images or your auction has been removed. As a guide, our starting price is £5,000 per image, although we licensed without fee in certain cases, but our claim against you is not limited to this amount. In all cases, we require a clear, readable credit and / or copyright ownership, together with a search engine friendly link. If you have a robots.txt file or similar, this should state "index, follow (link to our site / page)"; this should point to our page from which the image was sourced. Because you have used our images in a manner which competes with our own business, this may have reduced our profits by reducing the prices we are able to obtain for our own similar items, or by stopping our items from selling or reaching our minimum price. We are also entitled to request from you an account of any profits or benefits you have derived from the unauthorised use of our images, and to pay us the amount of your profit or benefit. We hereby request that you provide such account and make the appropriate payment to us. We are entitled to, and do, hold you responsible for any and all costs we incur in obtaining satisfaction against you, including administrative fees and legal costs.

It is not our responsibility to identify each and every image to you, or to provide proof of our ownership of the rights to the images. If you insist on us providing you with copies or the locations of each original, we retain the right to charge you an administrative fee. We have invested a considerable amount of money to equip ourselves with high quality professional photographic equipment, lighting equipment, computer equipment, and computer software, in order to be able to capture high quality professional photographic images. We have also invested considerable amounts of time in training and education to enable us to produce high quality results, and invested much time in the taking, recording, and processing of our images. Our investment in photographic image currently stands at approximately £400,000 (at at October 2015). It is with much anger and frustration that we note almost daily theft of our copyright material by private individuals and companies alike. You may consider your own infringement to be marginal or harmless. We can assure you that we see it as part of a larger and more serious problem. We are determined that theft of our copyright material will not go unpunished, and will seek appropriate compensation from any and all unauthorised users of our images or other copyright material, and this will include punitive as well as actual damages.

Copyright Infringements by Direct Competitors - Coin & Bullion Dealers, Jewellers

We suggest you remove all trace of our images or other copyright material from your websites or pages. Once you have done this, you should contact us in writing, and include:

• Your full contact details.
• The relevant images or other copyright material.
• The relevant pages on your website(s).
• A solemn undertaking not to re-offend. This should be in appropriate legal format and language. Consult a lawyer to help you draft the document if in any doubt.
• An account of all sales and profits from the direct or indirect use of our images or other material.
• A substantial offer of financial compensation. (Banking information). The minimum we will normally consider is £5,000. We have agreed on this amount on a number of occasions.
• A substantial payment on account, which you may wish to transfer direct to one of our bank accounts, details of which you can find on our About Us page...
• If you make it easy for us, we will not need to instruct our legal advisors, so there will be no additional legal fees, however if we feel that we need to consult or instruct our lawyers, we will hold you responsible for any and all of our legal fees, in addition to your own. 

If we receive the above before we have contacted you, we will give more favourable consideration to your approach.

Please note, this does not include any offer or commitment on our part to remove any or all of our Name & Shame pages. We pride our editorial integrity. If your approach and offer is genuine, and any correspondence is easy and cordial, we will give consideration to publishing a "pardon" on the relevant pages. If you really want us to completely remove the page about you, we would also consider this for a consideration at least equal to the amount of compensation. 

Commercial Indirect Competitor Including Advertising Portals Disguised as Expert Advice Sites

We consider you as a serious competitor, although not in quite the same class as a Direct Competitor. There are two obvious remedies, although a combination of the two may be appropriate. 

• Removal of all relevant material, and proceed to follow the suggestions for Direct Competitors, as above.
• Place a clear prominent credit and indexable link next to each and every copied image. Publish a clearly accessible and indexable apology and retraction page on your site. Allocate a prominent permanent advertising space for us on your site. Advise us fully of your actions.

Private Vendors on eBay & Other Auction Sites

We do consider you as a direct competitor. Although we welcome healthy competition, using our material in direct competition with us is unfair, and we do feel very strongly about it.
You should follow our suggestions for Direct Competitors as in (1) above, although we would probably accept a simple written undertaking in place of a solemn declaration. We would suggest a compensation of 10% of the value of your item(s), with a minimum of £100.

eBay & Other Auction Sites

We remain skeptical about any expressed sincerity about your respect for IP rights. We believe eBay and most other similar auction or listing facility sites to be in implicit collusion with your members. We frequently notice your tardiness and apparent reluctance to remove reported material promptly if at all, and we believe you have inadequate pre-emptive filtering and quality control over your members and their listings. You should contact us with your suggested remedies, but bear (1 above) in mind.

Website Developers and Designers 

If you are a contract web design company, content provider, graphic artist, photographer, or any other contract supplier for or to a website which has infringed our copyright by using our photographs, text, or other content without permission, then you should seek immediate professional legal advice. If you have provided your client with images which are copies of our photographs, then you are in breach of our copyright, as is your client. This applies whether or not you have modified, edited or otherwise processed our photos. In these circumstances, we are entitled to take legal action against both you and your client. In addition, your client may also have a legal case against you. If you have adequate legal insurance in place, this should cover the situation, and help you. If not, you have problems, but these are of your own creation. If your client supplied photos which you used for his website, then you are not completely absolved, as you could, and probably should, have checked with you client whether the original images were his, or were properly sourced and licensed.

Third Parties & Agencies

Some guilty web owners try to avoid responsibility and blame by claiming they used a third party to design and implement their websites. Legally and ethically this does not absolve the site owner. All businesses have a duty to check the credentials of their suppliers and contractors, and still bear ultimate responsibility for the site content.  A well-established, professional, competent supplier will have sufficient client liability insurance in place, but is unlikely to need it due to the high quality of their work and attention to sourcing of material used including images and text. If a website owner gets his website designed by a friend, student, or on the cheap, he should make proper enquiries about the sources used. Failure to do so would demonstrate negligence and a lack of ethics. The buck stops with you. If you have used a fully professional web designer, and they have “supplied” you with copies of our photos, you have a strong legal case against them for negligence. We suggest you put them under notice, and get them to check and show you their insurance policy.

Private Non-Commercial Sites

Including blogs, educational, collector, numismatic clubs, and advice sites. We welcome and encourage the use of our images on high quality, informative sites. Please ensure you place a clear credit and link near any and all images sourced directly or indirectly from our sites. Please advise us that you have done so, and include your full contact details. We do not expect any financial reward or compensation. This category is strictly for sites and pages which contain no paid advertising links. We will make an exception for high quality sites where a limited amount of sponsorship or other advertising helps to cover the costs of running a non-commercial site. If in any doubt please contact us.

Legality of Copyright 

Law

Under international (Bern convention), UK (including the "Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998"), US, and other national laws, it is not permitted to copy any original work of art including photographs which are subject to copyright, and textual content, without the copyright holders' consent.

Photographic & Other Images 

Please note that prohibition from copying images includes using derived and modified versions of images, inter alia because the modification itself entails copying. Any comments about images includes modified images. 

Licensing 

As copyright owners we do on occasion license other parties to use our images for specified purposes subject to receipt of suitable fees, and the use of copyright notices.
Prospective licensees should contact us with details of intended use, and their standard terms if any. Our terms will apply in the event of any other written agreement.
It is not our habit to license our images for use in competition with our own business.

License Conditions

All images must be accompanied by a copyright notice and credit, e.g. © www.chards.co.uk. If used on the internet whether on a website or auction, the copyright notice must also provide a link to our appropriate website or websites, e.g. © www.chards.co.uk.The copyright notice and credit should be clearly legible, and of a readable size, at least that of the normal text size in the article or web page. It must be clearly placed close to the image used.

License Fee Guidelines

We consider the following to be minimum rates, per single image, per use. All exclude VAT which must be added where relevant. Commissioned (competitor) £5,000. Commissioned (non-competitor) £150. Stock £100.