Copyright Aid

Hi all,

I wonder if someone could provide me with some advice.
I received an email from PicRights saying I have posted one of their "clients" photos (Reuters) on my website. On my website I have a news list which has links to articles elsewhere on the internet. One of the links is to an article I wrote for a national newspaper. When I put links onto this part of the website wordpress automatically places the title of the article and a small thumbnail of the picture onto my website. The picture itself isn't the original picture that Reuters owns it has the newspapers name written on the top of it. The newspaper has bought a licence to the picture and then added their logo. This what appears on my website.

Where do I stand. When you put links on websites like twitter and facebook the exact same thing happens a thumbnail comes up. Does this count as infringing copyright?

I don't want to be outside of the law but it seems a bit mad that they are suggesting thumbnails are illegal? Especially where someone else has bought a licence from them and changed the image, therefore surely it creates a new piece?

They will probably try and charge me a sum for having it on my website, which probably won't be enough to make it worthwhile getting legal advice, so I wanted to ask here first.

Thanks

hi TheTallOne and welcome to the forum.

If you have not copied the image onto you site and it is only there because of a reciprocal link with the newspaper site, then there is no infringement of the image. The law on this has been clarified by the European Court of Justice on three occasions in the recent past, but before Brexit so the British courts will follow that CJEU jurisprudence. In rising order of granularity, the cases are known as Svensson, Bestwater and GS Media. Put simply, if you only link to a site where an image is legally hosted that is permissible, even though it may appear that the image forms part of your site. The critical thing is that the must not be hosted on your own site. Clearly an ordinary screeenshot of your site will not show up this fact; only the HTML or other coding will show how and from where the image is obtained.