Picrights Reviews 246

Pic-rights claimed our company infringed Reuters copyright on one pic in a blog and demanded $700 if we couldn't prove we purchased rights to the pic. The blog is 14 years old, put up by an employee who left a decade ago. The copyright act is of 1968. The fair use act of 1976 overrides it. We need to ask, can Reuters prove the pic was copyrighted before 2011 and did anyone else have the pic before Reuters. The pic IPTC embeded data is blank. Does Reuters blank it when a license is issued ? if so, after 14 years how can we prove license when OUR records would have been shredded after 6 years [ as per tax allowances ]. If Reuters do NOT blank the IPTC because it should / would have the copyright owner in the hidden data - then the pic was obtained from a free to use site or a site not authorised to allow download - but we have no way to verify any of this. The blank IPTC form data hidden in the pic, thus resolves us from copyright. breach. A debt collector is under law, not the owner of the alleged debt as per Australian law. If money is owed for copyright infringement, then Reuters must lay the claim. UPDATE as of 24/04/2025. The business employs a contract copyright solicitor and the crux of the matter is 1. under the fair use act we are only obliged to remove the pic 2. no correspondence will be entered into by anyone with any alleged claim and that's the end of the matter.

Multiple demand letters for over $10,000 relating to specific genre of images on a political news website which covered anti-government demonstrations from abroad. Reported to National Security Services for targeting of dissidents as the demand letters have also resulted in the removal of articles critical of the particular foreign government.

Pic Rights is nothing but a scam!! These clowns actually tried to shake me down for my own image 🤣🤣🤣

To be fair, I understand a control for property rights, and that entities are assisting copyright holders in the internet age. And moving forward into unknown AI, etc. I honestly thought we had all our ducks in a row with my developers by purchasing photos thru legitimate channels. But one photo somehow was part of the stock, but not covered. To tell you the truth, I would have not written this review.. but then they continued their spree on the subject matter. I was going to pay the initial penalty they asked for; along with asking to be further being educated in the matter. In the beginning, I viewed this experience as a learning lesson. But soon realized they won’t educate, they are just enforcers, intimidators.
Picrights have set themselves up as profiteers in this niche. Not educators, just straight out bandit extortionist tactics. No transparency whatsoever, set a dollar figure from who knows where, and you are expected to pay or they will run to their associated law to tattle tale firm like little girls. (No one likes a tattle tale). Protection racket. What really infuriated me, is I am asking questions and the guy from Picrights, says out of nowhere, after months of receiving letters from them with the same penalty amount.. “oh, actually your penalty is too low as it’s a commercial site we now see” They more than doubled the penalty dollar amount. Typically, an amicable organization would be transparent with their pricing. They run some type of dart board method for all I know. Especially when they are forcing this matter on you. How they come up with their numbers again is never shown, discussed etc. Quasi racketeering.
I have no idea what goes on in Canada regarding entities such as this; who are not transparent to the public on how they come up with their penalty figures from the sky, and transcend to the public. Ridiculous. Total free for all.
Only organized gangs act like this.

Slimy scum set up a bare-bones website with MY address on it as "contact" information, pasted a copyright picture on the webpage, then sent me a letter demanding $1125 from me for using "their" picture. This is defamation, extortion and racketeering.

These cretins need to be in prison.

A rotten to the core, dead soul company, without ethics, morality and when closed down the world will be better.

Picrights, please don't reply, I'm not interested.

We had an email and letter from PicRights that immediately seemed fishy about a copyright infringement, lots of technical jargon and big words but nothing that provided anything legally binding as to why we needed to pay them, who made the claim and what infringement law we'd 'broken'. They continued to harass us after we told them not to contact us. Just ignore them, they target small businesses and look to scare them into paying them money.

what price do you put on a use of a photo . Definitely not £750
The issue is the amount they look to charge for using a photo

i just got a hard copy letter from the scum scammer company. what i did first is i googled them. i also googled the monica berg woman.

she claims that i have put pictures from some sources they say they represent, however i haven't seen any proof that they actually are representing anyone.

the 2 pictures that they want payment for ahahaha are from who knows how far in the past, 5 to 10 years ago, i have to check. what i did was the following:

at the end of the blog post for that first picture i put a source from of the information and deleted the stupid picture;

on the second picture that they troll me on their stupidly written snail mail, it was a .pdf file attached on my blog from a news web page, that i, transformed in a .pdf and all together with the .pdf came the picture as some sort of a surogate, which is not even put on my page, but again, inside the generated .pdf from the news page ahahaha.

so what i did is, i removed them both, however, on one of the links where they examined my micro enterprise which is non profit and we never ever profited as a no profit organisation since 2011, i linked the links with comments from this page, so that, miss. monika berg can look at these comments and know that WE KNOW WHAT SHE IS DOING.

i can offer her, to miss iceberg, 1 cent of an EUR for each of the pictures, so that is in total 2 cents, but no bank will accept this kind of payment.

to conclude: after reading these comments, im just gonna ignore this stupid idiots as there is absolutely no law here in my country to make all these false flags claims.

and also, where in the hell is she going to charge me? in alaska?

but first, she has to call me in court which will cost a lot of money, and btw, in which court? thu she said that she is not a lawyer nor that scum organisation with antihuman behaviour going after micro businesses like mine is a law firm. hey ICEBERG SALAD its cold outside, damn scummer.

what a joke

My South African website was hacked and suddenly, one of my pages was Russian.
On that Russian page was photos put there by the hackers.
So I deleted the page.
They are welcome to sue me. I and my lawyer is ready for the fXcktards,

I received a letter stating I had used their clients pictures without permission on my website . They had been on & screenshot sais pictures

The problem is some of those photos were sent by my friend who actually took the photos & the others I screen grabbed myself during video calls with the people in the photos.

Disgusting bullying but plausible. Initially we were shocked to doscover a picture on our website should have had a licence, but after taking it down, we were still hounded for money and threatened with legal action. Thank God for Trustpilot and these reviews, clearly showing this as yet another scam.

Sadly this seem to be a legit company engaging in extortion and intimidation. Their business model is based on the parasitism of the worst kind.
In some instances they don’t even represent the copyright owner, they just trawl the internet using AI targeting small publishers- majority of which use the images under the 'fair use' provision.

Thank God I was lucky enough to find my own backups and to figure out that the image they claimed, has never been published on my blog. They have replaced it! I could not trace when and how exactly they got into the SQL or CMS, but I am working on it. Police will figure more out.
These guys have a good idea of what is going on at your control panel and CMS. They approach their victim when there is most likely no more proof of your "innocence", probably by adjustments in SQL as well, and the new version of your faked page has already been indexed by search engines. Besides, they target very old publications, as I noticed after reading other victims' experiences. You might not remember anymore the details, especially if you have many posts, and you will admit at once, that it is what you published indeed yourself when confronted by the 'evidence'. And then you will most likely panic and delete it (with real evidence of their intrusion!) at once. Or perhaps you were really not careful enough and got an image protected by a copyright. But yet, even then you would pay not for the rights to use it but a ransome to an evil minded stranger who will most likely 'find' a few more 'mistakes' like that - I saw such feedbacks, too. It is a psychological game, a technically arranged hunting mis-en-scene. But even though these scammers might seem to be well prepared, their practices stay criminal. Do not let to make you scared by feedbacks that they 'really work with big companies' (even confirmed, such a dirty partnership would be rather a compromising fact to the 'big company'). Keep calm, make backups before you delete anything, make your own backups all the time, and forward their letter to police.

PS Just to compare it with your info: their contacts (in the middle of Swiss nowhere), bank account (in the capital), and a 'specialist' (accidently with a celebrity name) they use at the moment.

Monica Berg
Copyright Compliance Specialist / Service de conformité des licences
PicRights Europe GmbH
Tél.: +32 (0)23150500

PicRights Europe GmbH au nom de / on behalf of The Associated Press
Unterdorfstrasse 12,
8808 Pfäffikon SZ, Switzerland
Telephone: +32 (0)23150500

UBS Switzerland AG
PicRights Europe GmbH
IBAN:CH72 0021 6216 5210 9160 T
BIC: UBSWCHZH80A
Postfach 8098 Zürich Switzerland

This is a scam! Most ethical companies would issue a take-down order and if there is no compliance within a reasonable time frame then commence legal proceedings. If for whatever reason Picrights does proceed to court it would be thrown out as they have not followed correct legal procedures. Also, it would order to take court action the legal cost would outweigh any fees that are payable to them. So put simply just change the image and then ignore them.

**"I received a letter from Pic Rights claiming to have contacted my lawyer, the original owners, and even my family. Despite my lawyer's lack of knowledge about this, and despite my recent recovery from a year-long battle with cancer, Pic Rights continues to pursue me relentlessly.

I've searched their website and found no mention of this claim. Their aggressive tactics, including hounding my wife and child, are causing significant distress. This behavior suggests a company that is more concerned with profit than with the well-being of individuals, particularly families. Such actions could potentially harm the children of the involved businesses, making them complicit in child abuse.

Was contacted by this dodgy company three times about an image, they referenced the image and the website link. We took it off as soon as we got the email

6 months later...... still getting emails and now they are trying to charge is 295!! for an image we removed at the first notice

bunch of cowboys this company

This has got to be one of the worst companies! Charging 200$-300$ for a mere copyrighted photo being displayed on the site?! Totally unacceptable. They don't even give you a warning beforehand of anything. This has got to be one of my worst experiences.

Similar experience to most others sadly - initial letter, then hounded by these charlatans like there was no tomorrow. We had shared a public information notice re. Coronavirus and they leapt all over this rubbing their grubby little hands together. Perhaps ask your clients to watermark their work to make it clear? Perhaps advise those that use your client's work to turn off sharing capabilities online? There are a thousand and one things you can do to protect copyright materials but you choose not to because hounding often innocent people and demanding ridiculous sums of money is easy gains. Anybody working anywhere within this group should hang their heads in shame. Grotesque.