Automated image recognition: How using ‘free’ photos on the internet can lead to lawsuits and fines

The four-hour working week

Marco Verch describes himself both as a “professional photographer and speaker” from Cologne, Germany, and as an entrepreneur and marathon junky, who regularly receives medals for sporting achievement.

Back in 2012, Verch had a relaxed approach to people using his images on Flickr. In a now deleted blog post, he said that rather than issue legal demands for damages, he would email websites that used his Flickr images simply asking them to include a link back to his website.

“If there is no answer, it is not tragic. I am still happy that my photo was used and I will not get the idea to impose any rights by force,” he wrote.

He referred his readers to another article that criticised photographers who demanded hundreds of pounds from people who use their internet images apparently in breach of the licence terms.

Verch’s relaxed approach did not last.

He quit work in 2017 to spend a year testing 12 startup ideas, in a move that allowed him to cut his working hours.

“The four-hour week is possible and that just makes me so infinitely grateful,” Verch said at the time.

He blogged about having time to go swimming without needing to watch the clock and having time to talk to pensioners in the sauna afterwards.

He has travelled to take part in marathons, ironman events and other sports events with fellow “Frontrunner” ambassadors for sporting brand Asics.

It’s a lifestyle many would envy.

Marco Verch, a “2h39 marathoner”, is an affiliated Asics Germany “Frontrunner” (Picture: Screenshot, Asics.com)

Hurt and pain

Verch uses clauses in a 2004 version of a copyright licence known as Creative Commons (CC) – originally designed to facilitate the free sharing of images online – to claim substantial sums from organisations and individuals that reproduce his photographs without correctly including his licence attribution requirements.

CC licensing first emerged in 2002 and has developed to make licensing fairer both for photographers and users of copyrighted images.

Broadly speaking, CC licences are designed to enable the free distribution of copyrighted works, allowing the rights owners to give permission to others to share, use and build upon their work.

Verch has not disclosed how many invoices he has sent out to alleged copyright infringers.

A simple Google search identified a snapshot of over 290,000 results tied to Verch and Creative Commons excluding results from his own websites and Flickr galleries. If just 1% of these search results contained incorrect attributions, then there would be 2,900 potential claims at the time of the search. 

Swiss copyright lawyer Martin Steiger estimates that Verch sends out hundreds of demands each month.

Computer Weekly has documented over 80 named individuals and companies that have received threats from Verch during the course of this investigation.

Victims who have given interviews to Computer Weekly, and others who have published comments in blogs about Verch, said they had received intimidating demands for money from Verch or his agents despite the honest mistakes they had made.

Verch said that he did not know about the personal circumstances of the people he demanded money from.

“Many websites on the internet are operating with little to no personal information about the people or organizations behind the website. Often the only information is an email address and/or postal address,” he said in response to questions from Computer Weekly.

“This would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for me (or my team) to know the personal circumstances of individuals behind such sites.”

Verch said that in many cases he had reached amicable settlements. He claimed that in a “large number of cases” he or his agents “waive or heavily reduce” the licence fee “depending on the specific situation” – a point he declined to elaborate on.

Charity forced to close

Patty Knoops is the co-founder of a volunteer foundation that provided training and education for older women in the Netherlands. In December 2019, she received a legal letter from Verch.

Verch took issue with her foundation, Kijk Haar!, using one of his images without full accreditation. He demanded she pay €950, later reduced to €500, within 14 days or face further consequences.

When the fine threatened to wipe out her foundation’s modest finances, Knoops said she became “very depressed” and work “lost all meaning”. The charity decided it could not continue.

“It was terribly sad that we had to pull the plug from the foundation,” she said. “I wonder if Mr Verch realises how many people he has harmed with his shameful actions.”

“I was especially shocked by the threatening language, astonished because I didn’t even know which photo it was … and powerless because we as a foundation have no commercial interest whatsoever and just want to help people,” said Knoops.

Screengrab of photo used by the Kijk Haar! foundation, which resulted in a €950 bill to Verch (Photo: Motivational sign for healthy eating by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0)

Jenna Davis, founder of the Life In Düsseldorf website, also received an invoice from Verch within days of uploading a photograph from Visual Hunt, a search engine for free photographs.

The demand could not have come at a worse time.

“I actually emailed Marco back and mentioned that I needed more time as I was about to give birth and that what he is doing is illegal,” she said. “His response: ‘All the best for your upcoming birth. You can pay the invoice end of September if this helps.’ This was real. I was being charged and accused of something completely untrue,” she said.

A student who spoke to Computer Weekly on condition of anonymity said Verch targeted him through a third-party collection agency called Pixsy for using a photograph of a footballer.

“The email came at an incredibly difficult time for me,” the recipient said. “I was just starting my second year at uni and my father had passed away in November of that year so I was very fragile, so to have this sudden extra anxiety thrown upon me seriously toyed with my mental and financial state.

“Finding that sort of money for a student is far from easy, and with my dad’s funeral taking place not long before the deadline, I had more pressing matters to deal with than demands of money.”

Comments posted by dozens of others in Europe and North America across web forums, legal advice websites and on social media tell a similar story, with people receiving invoices of between $270 and $750 for their use of photographs they believed were free to use (see box: Victims’ stress and anxiety after receiving legal demands from Verch).

How the scheme works

Verch has flooded the internet with hundreds of thousands of photographs which are easy to come across when searching for “labeled for reuse” pictures on Google image search.

Nearly half a million images posted on at least four separate Flickr accounts (1, 2, 3, 4) include stock images of banknotes and coins, cooking ingredients or well-known tourist sites.

Many of the photos include search-friendly titles, dozens of tags and a selection of “related photos” to help people find Verch’s images on Flickr and Google.

Verch allows anyone to use the vast majority of his pictures for “free” under the Creative Commons “Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)” licence.

Screenshot of the mouse-click pop-up relating to “appropriate credit” for using CC BY 2.0 photos

Verch gives a ready-to-use example of his licence conditions on his own website. The terms suggest each photo should include links back to three different URLs, Verch’s exact title of the photograph and the author’s full name.

Most people might stop there, but Verch also includes a link to a simplified “human readable” summary of the CC BY 2.0 Creative Commons licence, which includes an additional requirement to list any changes made to the original picture, such as resizing it.

It is easy to overlook further licence conditions contained in a 1,900-word legal code, which is three clicks away from Verch’s homepage.

Make one mistake and you could receive a demand for payment.

Verch sometimes uses points in the legal code which are not found in the short-form version of the licence to underpin some of his claims. For example, in one case, his representative argued that a photo user had violated copyright by not including an image credit with sufficient prominence to meet the full legal code licence requirements.

And while Verch does provide a cut-and-pasteable HTML licence code under each of the photos on his blog, when viewed by Computer Weekly the site served Verch’s blog in German by default, a point which could confuse potential users who are unable to understand the language.

Verch said he used a plug-in service that automatically displays his site in the language of the user’s browser, claiming it “works very well from my testing”.

Computer Weekly has confirmed that Verch uses the plug-in translator, but screen captures of the website recorded in December 2019 and July 2020 and visits to the site by Computer Weekly journalists show that the automatic translation plug-in is not always reliable.

Verch’s ready-to-use example licence conditions and the HTML licence code do not appear beneath any of the photos he posts on Flickr, the platform where many are likely to find his pictures.

“I am [trying] to make it as easy as possible for people to clearly understand how they can use my photos,” Verch told Computer Weekly.

He said Flickr did not allow him to add cut and pasteable licence code beneath his pictures, but that he had provided the code and a link to the CC BY 2.0 information page on his blog.

However, Verch’s website and Flickr pages do not warn people who use his photographs that they are liable to receive legal demands for hundreds of euros in payment if they do not attribute Verch’s copyright notice correctly.

His HTML code requires linking to three websites – instead of the two required by the CC BY 2.0 licence – and makes no mention of a requirement that the photo user specifies if they edited the image in any way.

Verch’s image production line

Verch has published a large number of Covid-19 photographs and has sent out payment demands to people who do follow his copyright requirements (Photo: Medical mask with the inscription Covid-19 on dry autumn leaves by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0)

Taking, organising and uploading high-quality stock-style photos in the scale of Verch’s albums would normally be expensive and time-consuming.

Verch began using the Upwork.com website in 2017 to hire low-cost contractors from Eastern Europe and Latin America to populate his online galleries.

Over the course of three years, Verch paid over $110,000 to contractors on Upwork.com to provide him with unique photos of “attractions, food, stock photo, events”, records seen by Computer Weekly on Upwork reveal. He paid $35,956.50 to one Slovenia-based photographer alone. By September 2020, Verch had paid the photographer over $52,000 for more than 8,000 hours of work.

Verch restricted access to his accounts on Upwork after November 2019.

Records show that over the course of three years Marco Verch paid over $110,000 to contractors on Upwork.com to provide him with unique photos of “attractions, food, stock photo, events”

Records show that over the course of three years Marco Verch paid over $110,000 to contractors on Upwork.com to provide him with unique photos of “attractions, food, stock photo, events”

One contract seen by Computer Weekly shows that Verch paid a photographer $3 per image. In return, the photographer gave Verch the right to claim the photograph as his own work, and to pursue claims for compensation and damages from anyone who used the image without a licence.

Photographs like this made their way onto multiple Flickr accounts under Verch’s own name, but with no indication that they had been taken by other people.

A close review of the metadata, known as EXIF data, embedded in several of Verch’s Flickr images reveals the names of the people who actually took Verch’s photographs.

Screenshot shows the true photographer behind one of Verch’s pictures (Photo: Fresh Summer Cocktail by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0, edited by Computer Weekly)

‘The Marco’ Growth Hack

Verch has not explained how he produces his images, but the volume suggests that he invested heavily in automation or employed a large team to create the images for him manually.

The photographer ran a dedicated Flickr account to post images containing phrases in the news.

His now-deleted “Trending Topics 2019” contained 384,622 photos and attracted more than 4.4 million page views.

Many of the images depict the same image of a typewriter accompanied by different popular or newsworthy phrases, such as “Big Ben”, “Toronto FC” or “Baby Shark”.

Another of Verch’s websites promotes images about trending topics for people to use on Twitter. It contained over 460,000 identical images of typewriters with topical phrases posted between January 2019 and May 2020.

Investigation by Computer Weekly has established that Verch or people working for him posted an average of 900 images per day.

A one-hour video, “The Marco” Growth Hack, suggests that Verch uses customised software to generate and batch upload photos mirroring the headlines of trending news stories.

For example, when CNN published a story in August 2017 about Facebook and Instagram encountering service outages, Verch published a digitally altered picture image of Scrabble tiles on Flickr, with a title that copied CNN’s headline exactly.

The image used Scrabble tiles arranged to spell out the words “Facebook Down”. Other Scrabble images in the same collection spell out other phrases on images with titles taken from news headlines including “Florida Execution” and “Challenge Tesla”.

Photo: Facebook, Instagram experience outages Saturday, by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0

Alexander De Ridder, an expert in search engine optimisation, explains in the video how Verch appears to have used a computer “script” to generate these images.

“The script can take some text, create the image, upload to Flickr along with the licence terms, and then Pixsy is automatically going to enforce the licence,” he claims in his video. “That is all it would take to create a library of images that is thousands large and then just wait for the money to come in.”

Verch markets his own Plaghunter copyright enforcement software as a way for “professional and stock photographers to get the royalties they are entitled to” and to “make some extra money”.

He told Computer Weekly that in addition to using web interfaces and other software tools, he has used an Adobe Lightroom plugin, which would allow batch uploading of images.

Kain Jones, CEO of Pixsy, another copyright enforcement agency used by Verch and other photographers, said it was common for photographers to use automation to generate images.

“Many works (especially for designers and illustrators) are created using software and batch processes to generate the final product,” he said.

Court records show that Verch files lawsuits against people who used his “Trending Topics” pictures if they fail to follow his exact attribution requirements.

For example, he threatened to seek compensation and damages for the infringed photograph or “statutory damages of up to $150,000” from financial services company Moodie Bluez Consulting Corp for using one of his Scrabble word images in a blog post. In practice, cases are settled for much less.

Photo: Baby Shark (Trending Twitter Topics from 10.01.2019), by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0 

‘Authentic and trusty’

Verch pays to promote his work, increasing the chances that others will come across his “free-to-use” images while searching the net.

Marco Verch buys adverts on Google to promote his portfolio of Creative Commons images

He buys Google Ads to drive paid traffic to his portfolio of images, describing his pictures as a “Creative Commons” resource in the advertisement.

Verch’s Upwork.com profile shows that he also paid for “trusted” Wikipedia users to spread his images online until Wikipedia banned him.

“I have a lot of pictures in my Wikimedia account and [am] searching for a trusted Wikipedia author that will: Embed my pictures in english Wikipedia,” says the job posting. “Please be active in discussion with other users, use your real account and be authentic and trusty.”

Earning royalties the Verch way

Verch has set up his own company, Plaghunter.com, to automatically identify people who may have broken his strict licensing conditions.

The company offers a web service that uses computer scripts to scour the internet to help subscribers find where their images have been used online.

Marco Verch drinking from a coconut (Photo: Instagram.com/marcoverch.photography)

“Plaghunter helps professional and stock photographers to get the royalties they are entitled to,” Verch said in a German language interview from 2014. “Some users report five-digit amounts per month, which they charge.”

Verch has automated Plaghunter so extensively that he claimed he was able to spend less than four to five hours a week running the service.

He wrote in a 2017 blog that he uses the software services IFTTT, Dropbox and Mac-Automator to automatically file and print out invoices.

“It’s even better than the noise of the coffee machine when the printer suddenly ejects some outgoing invoices after getting up,” he wrote.

After nearly five years in business, Verch added new features to Plaghunter in 2018, making it possible to “submit copyright infringements with a few clicks”.

The same year, German-language blogs began emerging which reported that Verch was sending “invoices” for the unauthorised use of CC photos to people throughout the country.

One article on the Tarnkappe.info website resulted in 89 comments, many from people who had received unexpected invoices on behalf of Verch.

Lawyer Markus Kompa told Computer Weekly that he represented almost 100 clients in 2019 who have received legal threats from the German athlete.

“Most cases of CC-trolling of this year [2019] are related to clients who got such demands by Marco Verch,” said Kompa. “I didn’t really count but it is fair to say one per week minimum.”

The German courts are now making it more difficult for Verch and other photographers to claim damages for photographs they distribute on free-to-use licences.

Kompa has been successful at limiting Verch’s ability to collect cash to a maximum €100 for each picture.

He said that Verch and other people who make money from billing people for failing to license images correctly have not been able to show they make any serious income from selling photographs.

“All of these people, especially Mr. Verch, have not offered the slightest evidence that they ever earn more than very, very occasional money with their pictures in normal sales competition,” he told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Kompa said that Verch rarely puts up a fight when he rejects Verch’s financial claims against his clients. “That’s usually the end of the matter.”

Going international

Verch appears to have internationalised his operation in 2018.

Reports emerged on websites like JustAnswer.co.uk and Extortion Letter Info about Verch’s use of a licence fee collection agency called Pixsy to send demands for payment and threats of court action.

Pixsy manages and sends payment demands on Verch’s behalf. Those targeted receive an emailed “legal escalation notice” which includes an attached “Unauthorised use of photograph” complaint and an automatically generated “Evidence Report” [Temporarily unavailable].

Example of “escalation notice” received by this journalist, which prompted further investigation

Example of “escalation notice” received by this journalist, which prompted further investigation after Verch denied the possibility of non-monetary or discounted resolution despite a direct communication effort outside of Pixsy.

In the US, Pixsy typically demands a minimum of $750 to resolve what it describes as “unlicensed use”. The amount demanded depends on the jurisdiction of the target. It threatens to refer cases to one of Pixsy’s legal partners in the receiver’s local area “to secure the highest recoverable [amount] for copyright infringement” if people do not settle the claim quickly.

The copyright enforcement company describes Verch as a “respected photographer who takes significant steps to ensure that his imagery and its value is protected”.

“Verch is a big source of business for Pixsy,” said one legal expert working on an active case against Verch, on condition of anonymity.

In the past, Pixsy sent those it targets with lists of persons who had already paid Verch’s fines.

“The last email request from Pixsy had an attachment for ALL of the cases that Pixsy had on behalf of Marco Verch,” one recipient said at the Extortion Letter Info website.

“According to this, he has collected >$300K worth of licensing settlements with Pixsy,” the message continued, “including providing multiple licences for the image he is pursuing me for.”

Verch said he had “no comment” about the existence of such a licensing settlement list, while Pixsy would neither confirm nor deny its existence of the $300,000 list.

“Without seeing the alleged emails or documents, I would not be able to comment or even verify they are in fact, legitimate or unaltered documents,” said Pixsy CEO Kain Jones.

Pixsy claims in its letters that “Unlicensed usage takes power away from photographers and significantly devalues their work. This misuse severely impacts the market value of Mr. Verch’s work, and has made it more difficult for him to license imagery at his high standard rates”.

But there is little publicly available evidence Verch ever sold substantial numbers of his photos commercially.

None of his works can be found on platforms like iStockPhoto, Shutterstock or Depositphotos, where stock-style material costs between $4.90 and $11 per photo. Other photo libraries such as the Mary Evans picture library supply photographs for between £40 and £150.

Instead, Verch offers a grand total of seven photos for sale at his SmugMug profile, for much higher rates: $882.36 each. At the time of writing, he had also made 103 generic stock images available on the Adobe Stock photo library, a commercial subscription service.

Screenshot: Marco Verch offers seven photographs for sale for $882.36 each on his SmugMug album. He declined to say how many photographs he had sold. (Credit: Aerial Photography: Seychelles, featuring thumbnails of copyright photos by Marco Verch)

Verch claimed that he had sold and licensed photographs from his websites for a number of years.

He would not say during his interview how many photographs he had sold commercially and how much of his income came from sending out enforcement notices.

“Unfortunately, I do not know the exact ratio,” he said.

Instead, he mentioned a study by the City of Hamburg featuring two aerial photos of the city that he had taken, as proof that he sold photos commercially.

Going legal

Verch registers images in large batches with the US Copyright Office, allowing him to sue infringers in the US for significantly higher sums than he could using Pixsy or Plaghunter.

Registering images is considered best practice for photographers and is necessary in US law for photographers to claim statutory damages in the event copyright is breached.

Marco Verch registers his images with the US Copyright Office

Normally working with cont roversial lawyer Richard Liebowitz – whom US district judge Denise Cote in October 2018 dubbed a “copyright troll” for filing over 1,120 copyright suits– Verch regularly pursues users of his photos with six-figure claims.

In a 2019 memorandum opinion and order, a judge in the Southern District of New York wrote: “Richard Liebowitz is a known copyright ‘troll’, filing over 500 cases in this district alone in the past twenty-four months.”

The US courts have defined a copyright troll in legal rulings. According to one court decision, “A copyright troll plays a numbers game in which it targets hundreds or thousands of defendants seeking quick settlements priced just low enough that it is less expensive for the defendant to pay the troll rather than defend the claim.”

Data from PacerMonitor.com, which tracks federal court cases, showed 40 cases directly linked to Verch, with 38 represented by Liebowitz, when viewed by Computer Weekly.

And the vast majority of those sought either compensation tied to the infringement of the photo or the full $150,000 possible under US law. In practice, most are settled for less.

Liebowitz sought exactly that in a lawsuit against Columbia University, filed in September 2019, for the “willful, intentional, and purposeful” use of one of Verch’s photos – in a tweet.

Columbia University faced a legal demand of up to $150,000 for using one of Marco Verch’s images in a tweet (Photo: Business background concept, by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0)

“Columbia University did not license the Photograph from Plaintiff for its article, nor did Columbia University have Plaintiff’s permission or consent to publish the Photograph on its Website,” the claim reads.

That’s because the tweet didn’t attribute Verch as creator – often a technically impossible feat given the level of Verch’s attribution requirements – in the 280 characters supported by Twitter.

He claimed that in the majority of cases people don’t post his images on Twitter, they link to a webpage containing the photograph and the copyright notice.

Verch also offers individual licence agreements on his website. “This can be useful, for example, if for technical reasons you cannot or do not want to link to the original image or the conditions,” the site states.

He said that he had seen people include the text “Photo Credit: Marco Verch” in tweets “to comply”, but did not make it clear whether that would satisfy his licensing conditions.

The credit terms suggested on Marco Verch’s Foto.Wuestenigel website often don’t fit within the maximum length of a tweet

The same threats of damages have also been sought in other recent Marco Verch cases, for example, versus The Institute for New Economic Thinking, Cox Media Group and Sea Breeze Syrups.

In Europe, however, there are signs that courts are becoming less sympathetic. In May 2020, the Commercial Court in Zurich overturned Verch’s claims for damages of €6,127 against a media company he claimed had used his photographs without complying with his licensing terms (see box: Swiss court finds that Marco Verch’s free photos have zero financial value).

The court found, in effect, that because the photographs were not sold, then any damages Verch was entitled to would be zero.

Verch told Süddeutsche Zeitung that his photographs have value both because they offer Verch a “big advertising effect” and they could be sold commercially.

If the photographs were worthless then the media company would not have made a counteroffer to settle, he said.

Verch suggested that he might have forgotten to send the invoice over to the court.

There were courts, he claimed, that had awarded him compensation.

Verch agreed to an interview with a journalist from Süddeutsche Zeitung.

They met in the WeWork building in Friesenplatz, Cologne, a shared workspace.

Verch expressed little sympathy for people who have received unexpected invoices after making mistakes with the licence.

“Whether he pays €200 in advance, uses the picture, or first uses the picture and then the €200, the balance is the same,” he said.

The evidence gathered by Computer Weekly, though, shows that Verch’s victims receive demands for payment that are frequently higher than €200, and can often be as high as $750 or more.

Verch is adamant that sending out invoices for his photographs is not his business model, despite offering Plaghunter as a service to identify and seek payments from copyright infringers.

He said he has a lot of income streams, normally licensed images, his Plaghunter service and reselling items.

He said he sees his role as partly to educate people in Creative Commons, he told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Many bosses ask their trainees or junior employees to source pictures, and they turn to Google, said Verch, arguing that he tries to fill gaps in their knowledge.

Animal farm

Verch publicly announced in summer 2020 that he was a supporting member of Wikimedia and to make regular donations to Creative Commons, along with other good causes.

He added a page to his website, between 21 June 2020 and 10 July 2020 listing a range of charitable causes he supported, according to records on the internet archive.

He lists himself as a member of the German Animal Welfare Association, the animal rights organisation Peta, an educational charity, the World Wide Fund for Nature and Doctors Without Borders.

He informs people about a donation he made on the crowdfunding site Startnext he made to a farm that allows young people to learn about animals.

And he has posted a certificate on his website showing his sponsorship of “Trudi the Pig”, one of the animals kept by an upmarket vegan animal-friendly hotel, where Verch stayed in August 2020.

As for charities, like Patty Knoops’ volunteer foundation, Verch said in mid-October 2020 that he either no longer writes to such institutions or only briefly draws their attention to the mistake.

He said he did not know every case where a non-profit organisation had received one of his payment demands. “They are probably also much older cases,” he said, adding that it is not always possible to see who is behind an organisation.

Marco Verch has begun publicising his contributions to animal welfare and other charities, including a certificate for sponsoring Trudi the pig at the Villa Vegan vegetarian resort during a holiday in August 2020 (Source: Marco Verch and Villa Vegan)

The future: Pixsy, Flickr, Wikimedia and Creative Commons

In practice, Verch would not make so much money from copyright infringers were it not for the now 16 years old CC 2.0 licence, known as Attribution 2.0.

“The mission of CC is to enable and promote sharing,” said Diane Peters, general counsel for Creative Commons, the US not-for-profit which created the CC licences to “give every person and organization in the world a free, simple and standardized way to grant copyright permissions”.

And while it’s important for licensees to respect the terms of the licence, Peters said “we don’t like...our tools being used opportunistically” where “litigation is threatened as the first course of action”.

As an organisation valuing “openness and generosity”, rights owners and publishers should avoid “AI-based enforcement services” and instead “build direct relationships and work together to resolve disputes amicably whenever possible”.

As the Creative Commons organisation has evolved, so too have its licences, in ways that would mostly prevent Verch’s scheme from operating.

CC 4.0 requires a 30-day period to resolve attribution problems before fines or court cases can be pursued.

But Pixsy’s CEO, Kain Jones, declined to say why the organisation, which said it works with over 80,000 photographers, artists, brands and agencies, does not follow the best practices laid down in CC 4.0.

“Pixsy represents thousands of photographers, agencies and creatives around the world to assist them with monitoring where and how their images are used online,” said Jones.

“When our clients detect their images being used without permission or outside of a valid licence, we empower them to resolve the matter easily and professionally.”

It was common in the industry, said Jones, for photo platforms or agencies to hire photographers or artists to create images who assign the rights back to the commissioning organisation.

“Mr Verch, like all creators, has legal rights for the content he creates and owns. It is their legal right to set out the usage terms and enforce those rights when they are misused or infringed,” he said.

Clients like Verch must submit claims on a “case-by-case basis”, Jones said, adding that his firm “partners with leading IP/copyright law firms”.

“While our image monitoring solution uses computerized technology, our copyright enforcement work relies on human beings to handle each matter. Each copyright case we work on is individually reviewed by our customer and only submitted to us if it’s a clear commercial infringement of their copyrights,” he said.

Flickr did not respond to questions from Computer Weekly.

Meanwhile, there is nothing to stop Verch sending threats and invoices to people who fail to follow his licence conditions to the letter.

Flickr and other photo-sharing sites could stamp out this sort of scheme in the future by updating their photo-sharing licence to CC 4.0 for all new uploads.

Failing that, global copyright rules will need to change to reflect the true intention of the licence: to facilitate free sharing.

Knoops, the lady who shut down her voluntary foundation, said Verch was causing more harm than he realised. “My message would be that his methods will cause many [more] victims, more than he can imagine,” she said.

“Good people who put in their heart and soul to help others are devastated by the activities of Mr Verch, who is making easy money with … Plaghunter. It’s a good thing that copyright exists, but this is not how this law was meant to be!”

Update 18 November - After publication of this article Verch disabled public access to his own website containing his portfolio of photographs, his 'Twitter Trends' photographs website, along with his LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter profiles and his YouTube account.

Full disclosure: Chad O’Carroll’s news organisation NK News/NK Pro has also been the recipient of a payment demand from Marco Verch via Pixsy. Computer Weekly learned during the course of the investigation that its parent company, TechTarget, has been the recipient of a past payment demand from Marco Verch via Pixsy.