Accusations of Online Copyright Infringement
Crafting a proportionate response
When lawyers send letters accusing you of copyright infringement, there is a dual intention.
They want to get the best possible remedy for their client. Their method for achieving that is to unsettle you. So language is formal, the deadlines are short, and the figures mentioned often seem wildly disproportionate.
It’s very important to avoid being provoked into a fast, emotional response. It’s rare for defiance, apology or avoidance to be best options.
To get the best outcome here’s what you need to do:
1. Secure the Evidence Immediately
The very first thing you should do is secure the evidence. Take screenshots of the material complained of immediately, using full-screen captures that show the content in context, including the URL and the date and time. Undated or partial screenshots are close to useless. Once content is altered or removed, it is onerous and expensive – sometimes even impossible - to retrieve it.
2. Establish What Actually Happened
Once the evidence is secure, you need to establish what actually happened inside your organisation. This is an internal exercise and it should be approached calmly. This is not the moment for blame. People are far more likely to conceal mistakes when they feel under attack, and a cover-up will almost always cause more damage than the original infringement.
You need a clear and accurate picture of how the material was sourced, who approved its use, what permissions were thought to exist, how long it has been used, and for what purpose. Any legal advice you receive will only be as good as the facts it is based on.
3. Consider the Moral Position, Not Just the Legal One
It is worth stepping back from the aggressive tone of the letter and considering the underlying moral position. Behind most copyright complaints is not a faceless corporation but an individual creator — a photographer, composer, artist, or writer — trying to earn a living.
Strip away the legal threats and imagine that person had contacted you directly and politely. What would you have thought was fair? What would have felt like an honourable outcome in your industry? The answer might be an offer of a few hundred pounds, a few thousand, or substantially more. This exercise is not about conceding liability; it is about anchoring your thinking in proportionality.
4. Research the Real Market Value
You should research what the market actually pays for the kind of material you have used. This is not specialist legal knowledge. Stock libraries, licensing agencies, published rate cards, and comparable commercial uses are all readily available. The examples given in the lawyers’ letter will be extreme and partial and must be challenged.
Understanding what legitimate users normally pay provides a baseline against which the demands in the letter can be assessed. The sums demanded are often many times higher than real-world licence fees, and knowing this matters when strategy and settlement are discussed.
5. Weigh the Cost of Stopping Against the Cost of Continuing
You should then consider the practical cost of stopping the activity complained of. Ask yourself what it would cost to take the material down or cease the use entirely, and balance that against the cost, risk, and distraction of continuing.
This is a commercial judgement rather than a legal one. If the material adds little value but creates ongoing exposure, the answer may be straightforward. If stopping would cause genuine operational or reputational harm, that may require a bespoke, non-standard, negotiation.
6. If Stopping Is Easy, Stop
Where stopping or removing the material costs very little, it is usually sensible to do so. This is not an admission of wrongdoing. It is risk management. Continuing a low-value activity after receiving a legal complaint rarely improves your position and often worsens it.
If you do stop, it is essential to ensure that everyone internally understands that the activity must not resume. Repeated use after notice is far harder to defend than an isolated mistake.
7. Get Legal Advice Before You Respond
At this point, and not before, you should obtain advice from a lawyer. You should not reply to the letter yourself. Well-intentioned responses often contain apologies, explanations, or misused legal phrases such as “without prejudice” that have non-obvious meaning. A poorly drafted reply can hand the other side leverage they did not previously have.
8. Ensure the Response Is Lawyer-Written or Ghost-Written
The response should ultimately be written by a lawyer or at least ghost-written by one. This ensures the tone is controlled, nothing is inadvertently admitted, and the legal landscape is quietly shaped in your favour. It also signals that you are taking the matter seriously without appearing panicked.
9. Address the Injunction Risk Head-On
When speaking to your lawyer, it is worth asking how the response will influence the other side into advising their client that a court is unlikely to grant an injunction. Injunctions are often the real pressure point in copyright disputes, and deflating that threat early can change the entire dynamic of the case.
10. Shift the Costs Narrative
You should also ask how the response will encourage the other side to recognise that any offer made is so reasonable that pressing on could expose their client to paying your legal costs. Shifting the risk calculus in this way often brings matters to a swift and sensible conclusion.
11. Make Sure the First Letter Is the Longest One
It is also worth asking your lawyer how they will ensure that your first response is the longest letter that ever needs to be written.
Early correspondence sets the tone for everything that follows. A well-crafted initial letter can quietly close down entire lines of argument, address the key legal risks, and signal that further escalation will be met with clarity rather than concession. Poorly drafted early responses, by contrast, invite endless back-and-forth, each round increasing cost, friction, and exposure.
The goal is not verbosity for its own sake. It is to deal comprehensively, calmly, and decisively with the real issues at the outset so that subsequent correspondence, if any, becomes shorter, more focused, and easier to resolve. In many cases, the best outcome is that there is no second letter at all, or the second response simply refers back politely to the first one.
12. Aim for a Short, Calm, and Precise Final Letter
The letter that eventually goes out should be short, calm, and mostly written in plain language. It should not pick unnecessary fights or indulge in performative aggression, and it will almost certainly not be marked “without prejudice”.
A small section of it will use more formal, carefully chosen language rooted in legal precedent. That part does important work behind the scenes, particularly in neutralising the threat of injunctive relief. The rest should communicate reasonableness, clarity, and confidence.
Final Thought
Copyright disputes are about the law but they are also about leverage, uncertainty, and fear. If you slow the process down, gather proper evidence, understand what actually happened, keep a sense of moral and commercial proportion, and respond through a lawyer with restraint, you put yourself in a far stronger position — usually without the dispute ever reaching court. To help you achieve this outcome, please contact us