PicRights Ltd: the shady company hounding journalists over historic cases of copyright infringement
What they do isn’t illegal, but it is unscrupulous If you are a digital journalist or blogger, you will know how important it is to ensure your images are copyright-free. Copyright is the exclusive and legally-protected right to reproduce, adapt, use, distribute and display an original work of authorship, such as a photograph. In other words, you can’t just nab any old photo from Google Images or a random website, because it legally belongs to the person who took the photo and you can’t use it without their permission. However, until the arrival of PicRights Ltd, disputes could usually be resolved easily between the photographer and the journalist without having to resort to court, and you would never be faced with a huge fee. Usually, the producer of the image would just ask for a credit and no money would be exchanged.PicRights is a global company who scour the internet for copyrighted images which have been used without the owner’s permission and track down the publishers, demanding money. Often, these are historic cases, with the pictures in question having been put up years previously. Given the number of complaints I have heard from journalists about how annoying this company are, I decided to do try my hand at investigative journalism and dig a bit deeper into their activities. The company was incorporated in the US in 2016 and they set up their UK branch two years later, which is headquartered in London. They have emerged as by far the most active enforcer of copyright for photos in this country and beyond. Their proclaimed objective is “to resolve copyright infringements quickly and fairly, without resorting to the courts.” But often, it is PicRights who create the dispute themselves — and of course, they turn a tidy profit from this process of ‘resolution.’
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