[B]Levenson Inquiry witness says photographers are regularly swindled by national newspapers.[/B]

According to Tom Rowland, a veteran Fleet Street journalist best know for his time working on the Daily Telegraph newspaper, during his appearance at the ongoing Leveson Inquiry into standards in journalism, newspapers regularly steal photographs from photographers in order to avoid paying for them.

Rowland offered the inquiry an example of a photograph that had been published in a newspaper where the copyright watermark had been cropped out and the photographer allegedly received no payment for the use of the picture.

He described this practice as outrageous and questioned a recent suggestion that photographic theft by newspapers was much less rife now than it was back in the 1970s. He said the problem was now much worse because of electronic imaging, implying that it was simply much easier to find and steal images.

Here at Digital Photography Now we share this concern as we have been victim to image theft from our website. The thief even admitted the offence, claiming that images on the Web were there for the taking. In fact the image stolen was a full resolution camera sample image, not a web-resolution image. We were only offered a derisory sum in lieu of retrospective usage fees.

We investigated the possibility of suing him and his company (a software developer) for image theft and copyright infringement (the image had been used extensively online and in publicity material) but we were advised that there were major risks [COLOR=Red][COLOR=Black][I]to [/I][/COLOR][I]us [/I][/COLOR]in taking this action.

Someone please remind me that the law is supposed to protect the innocent?