Handling copyright infringement complaints
News organisations may occasionally receive complaints from companies acting on behalf of agencies such as PA Images or Reuters when their images are detected on an unlicensed website.
This can happen when journalists accidentally upload stories to their websites and use a copyrighted image they aren't licensed to use, or when the company isn't aware of a partnership allowing images to be used.
If unresolved, the company pursuing your website may engage lawyers to initiate legal proceedings. In such cases, you should seek professional legal advice.
On this page, we'll outline some general tips and who to contact in potential situations.
Preventing copyright disputes
The best way to avoid emails demanding thousands in "settlement fees" for misusing copyrighted images is to ensure all the images you use on your website come from sources you have permission to use.
These could be graphics you have engaged a professional designer to create, photographs you've taken yourself or provided from a source with permission to distribute them, or stock images from a royalty-free source or that you have paid to use.
Pexels and Pixabay are commonly used sources for free stock images. If you need images of a specific place or person, check out Wikimedia Commons to see if there are any copyright-free (CC-0) images you can use.
If you aren't sure of an image's provenance (where it originally came from), you should avoid using it.
In Aiir's CMS, you can give images uploaded to the Media Manager a name or caption that indicates where they came from and any usage restrictions to avoid trouble in the future.
Images from news partners
Aiir's CMS allows web stories from select news partners, such as IRN, to be made available on the websites of licensed stations.
These images are hosted by IRN's preferred news provider - currently Sky News - and cannot be modified, stored or re-used within Aiir's CMS.
That doesn't necessarily prevent copyright enforcers from demanding compensation for their use, unaware of the agreement between your station, IRN and Sky News, who will be licensed to use the image.
In such cases, contacting IRN/Sky usually allows them to resolve the issue without any financial penalties.
Images from professional photographers
We're also aware of cases where stations have paid a photographer to cover an event and given permission to resell the images, only for an agency to later try claiming ownership.
In situations like this, you should contact the photographer and request that they resolve the issue with the agency that is seeking compensation for the image's use.