Most photographers who put pictures on the web – or publish them in magazines – are likely to have the experience of opening a web site and finding to their surprise that one (or more) of their pictures is being used without their permission.
It’s a problem I’ve written about in the past and doubtless will return to. The first thing to do is perhaps to make sure it really is your picture – especially if it’s a picture of a popular place or event other people may well have had the same idea as you and produced a very similar image.
If it was taken from the web, it’s quite likely still to contain the metadata that you always include – such as your copyright message and contact details (and if you are not including these you should be.) If it was scanned from a magazine it won’t have your metadata, and of course some software discards much or all of it from web images.
Once you are sure it is your picture that has been used, you need to consider whether the use could be legal. If you sell images through an agency or picture library, the person using it may have a licence for the use they are making, and in some countries, particularly the USA, the concept of ‘fair use’ may give people rather more licence to use work without permission than in the UK. Probably the main area where such as use would normally be accepted here is in reviews of exhibitions and publications, where normally selected images are made available by galleries and publishers.
Photo Attorney Carolyn E. Wright, LLC, in her post Help! I’ve Been Infringed! provides excellent advice from a US perspective on the various options for dealing with this, starting with doing nothing at all and ending with going ballistic – or rather File a Copyright Infringement Lawsuit.
Although much of it applies in other countries, in the UK photographers are perhaps less greedy than in the US – or rather the law allows them to be. She warns against sending invoices at three times the normal rate for any unauthorised use – apparently fairly usual in the US – on thegrounds that you may otherwise get considerably more. Most photographers here are happy to settle for double, and invoice on that basis.
You’ll also need to decide whether filing with the US Copyright Office is worth the cost and they hassle involved. While she recommends it strongly, for those of us not based in the US I think it is considerably more debatable.