Chasing a copyright abuser nets £200 an hour

A WRITER member reports a grand return - £950 - for chasing up thieving use of her material by a corporate online outfit. The culprit maybe ought to have known better, since it is a spin-off from a major print magazine, now deceased, that knew how to negotiate use of copyright work.

The member, who prefers to remain anonymous, ran fairly randomly into a 3500-word feature that she'd written for a different magazine in the early 1990s. The feature had apparently been ensconced on the culprit's site for a year or three already. She had had no polite enquiry, not given permission and, above all, not had a fee.

So she emailed the culprit and - over a couple of months - plodded through vague rebuffs from a site staffer who was blatantly a copyright dunce. She searched through old invoice files that she had diligently kept so that she could prove her ownership if asked in just such a case.

In a further email she laid it all out and invoiced for a fee of £270 per thousand words. Given the apparently slim chance of a civil negotiation, she billed at a modest current rate, rather than the £150 or so per thousand words that she had been paid back when.

By way of incentivisation she added a 100 per cent surcharge for unauthorised use - mitigated by a "without prejudice" offer to settle for the stated word rate if she was paid within 30 days.

(Saying that you are writing "without prejudice" means that your message should not be quoted in legal proceedings if it comes to that. It's far from watertight: the Freelance has seen a judge snort derisively at a message being labelled "without prejudice" when the court in fact insisted on taking it in evidence.)

This email got an apology - and £950 hit her bank account within a fortnight, which was about two months after her first email. That's easily worth the four hours' work involved in digging out old documents and crafting polite but persuasive messages.

© Phil Sutcliffe