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Author Topic: Masterfile Letter in Canada  (Read 4980 times)

jeffskippy

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Masterfile Letter in Canada
« on: February 16, 2010, 01:25:11 AM »
My wife and I run a small business in Alberta, Canada.  We have recently received a letter from Masterfile regarding copyright infringement, concerning a photo posted on our website.  Never hearing of this company before, or expecting a copyright issue, I dismissed this letter, fearing a scam.  I ignored it for a couple of days, then thought I'd do some investigating.  In an attempt to ascertain the legitimacy of this letter I had politely asked the Compliance Officer for the following information:

* Proof of the title of copyright including exclusivity
* The date of first publication and the date of copyright issuance
* How many companies/persons have been granted the rights to distribute the images
* Proof that the images have never been contained, in any other image libraries
* The date Masterfile Corporation obtained the legal right to distribute the images
* A breakdown of the costs claimed to have been incurred as a result of the alleged copyrighted images being displayed

I thought that would be enough to discourage the writers of the letter if they were indeed scam artists.  Evidently this is not the case.  The Compliance Officer responded with most of the above information, and of course an extremely short deadline.

My wife had commissioned a designer to build our website close to 6 years ago, as we have no experience in this field.  This company assured us they had thousands of stock photos to help fill our website.  As my wife had just started up our company, and we had very few images of our own, we used some of these images.  This design company has unfortunately ceased operations, and we cannot track down the owner of the company or designer of the site to verify how they obtained the image in question.  Our website does not directly generate any money of our business - we do not accept payment through our site.  Masterfile has demanded a payment of $6030.00, and claims that this fee is "fair, balanced and reasonable".  I vehemently disagree, as this fee amounts to close to 10% of our net profit for 2009, and we had no idea we were in violation of any copyrights.  I certainly do not believe we are in the wrong.

Could you kindly consider my information and advise on how to proceed?

Thank you very much!

Oscar Michelen

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Re: Masterfile Letter in Canada
« Reply #1 on: February 16, 2010, 01:12:42 PM »
Well, Jeff, Masterfile will sue so you are best off trying to work out a reasonable settlement with them. I agree that the number they are at now is very high and no court would ever award them $6,000 for a single image. I would suggest gathering some information about your site (page views, traffic, etc) to try and convince Masterfile that the use was minimal.  Also any proof that you paid a third party to the site might help convince them that you would have an innocent infringement argument.  If you like, we'd be glad to help you with it as well, as we have many cases against Masterfile in our office. Call  me at 516 248 8000 to discuss it at your convenience

jeffskippy

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Re: Masterfile Letter in Canada
« Reply #2 on: February 16, 2010, 03:20:41 PM »
Thanks for Getting back to me, your information is very valuable.  Since this is my first (and hopefully last) time going through something like this what kind of sum could be considered reasonable?

Oscar Michelen

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Re: Masterfile Letter in Canada
« Reply #3 on: February 16, 2010, 03:36:55 PM »
Thats hard to assess without more information. How long was the image up, when did they register it? What proof do you have that a third party acquired the images for you? etc etc  I would be glad to talk to you about it as I don't want to set forth all of the negotiating issues and what the standard result is for an  image or two as I am sure Masterfile monitors this blog.

 

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