Coin Copyright Infringements by Abuser Category
Our high quality copyright coin, medal, & jewellery images are stolen on a daily basis by fellow dealers (competitors), bloggers, pseudo-expert & advice sites acting as eBay & Google portals, eBay & other auction site sellers.
Our websites contain some of the best numismatic photographs on the internet, and more of our images get illegally copied than any other dealers, featuring on hundreds of websites worldwide.
On this page we discuss the different categories of copyright thieves, together with a few of our more printable thoughts about them.
We have a name and shame policy for copyright thieves. These are currently listed on, and linked from, a number of pages, including Copyright Abuse Alphabetical, and eBay Copyright Thieves, but each of these pages is getting too long, and we will soon be splitting them into categorised sub-pages.
Copyright Notice
Please see our "Copyright" page for further information.
Copyright Infringements Remedies
Our suggested draft remedies for copyright abusers dependent on category - competitors, bloggers, pseudo-expert & advice sites acting as eBay & Google portals, eBay & other auction site sellers.
Other Copyright Abuse
Other Copyright Abuse
Copyright Infringements by Coin Dealers
A wide range of coin dealers infringe our copyright by stealing our photographs.
These include British dealers, US, German, Belgian, Australian, Canadian, Chinese. Some of these dealers are undoubtedly small part-time one-man dealers, others are full time, professional dealers with numerous employees. It also includes at least one member each of the BNTA and the LBMA. Whichever category they belong to, there is no excuse to use our images without our consent. As they are using our pictures to compete directly or indirectly with us, we class these as among the worst type of copyright thieves. In many case, these dealers attempt to portray themselves are highly ethical, in other cases they say little about their own integrity or reputation, at least on their "About Us" web pages, perhaps because they have never thought it important, perhaps because they know they are dishonest.
We intend, in due course to serve legal notice on all of these, and possibly continue further legal action unless we receive appropriate responses, including in all cases an apology, an undertaking to desist permanently, and an appropriate amount of compensation, which is some cases could be substantial.
Bullion Dealers
There are a similar number of bullion dealers also stealing our images. Some of these are coin dealers too. These are, if anything, more serious than the coin dealers, as the amounts of money involved are often greater, and trust becomes more important when dealing in larger amounts.
Apart from this, our comments are the same as for coin dealers.
Jewellers
Some jewellers deal in gold coins, and once again there are many jewellers worldwide who steal our pictures. In almost all cases these are full time professionals, usually with retail premises, and with numerous employees.
Jewellers often know much less about coins than coins dealers know, and often know less about jewellery than coin dealers do. This is possibly because they are only shopkeepers specialising in jewellery rather than jewellery experts.
Similar comments apply to jewellers as to coin dealers.
Private Vendors on eBay & Other Auction Sites
These are the most numerous possibly because there are simply more of them than the above categories.
It is undoubtedly also because the private individual has less to lose in that he has no established reputation to maintain. We firmly believe that site operators such as eBay know very well indeed that their members who wish to sell form a largely unregulated market, and take unfair advantage of this by permitting, facilitating, and doing very little to discourage their members from committing copyright theft.
If we concentrate on eBay, it is because they are the biggest in this market, with an effective near worldwide monopoly and stranglehold. For the first few reported offences, and the vast majority must go unreported, their sellers get less than a slap on the wrist. We have found some eBay members repeatedly violating our copyright, and although we have not conducted a formal count, there must be some who we have reported on over 10 occasions, and there appears to have been no eBay sanction against them. We believe eBay could and should take much more positive action to deter copyright infringement in the first place, and punish repeat offenders much more promptly. This also applies in our experience to fraud and suspected fraud by eBay sellers, and we believe eBay are happy for most of it to continue unless or until enough people complain to their respective law enforcement agencies and / or local news and media organisations. If there is enough bad publicity, eBay will eventually take some action and issue its usual mantra that "eBay take all ... seriously...". With this in mind, we accuse, here and elsewhere, eBay of being sufficiently aware, and sufficiently condoning of copyright abuse, fraud, attempted fraud, deception, and other dishonest practices to be considered as an accessory and willing participant. They certainly receive substantial financial revenues from these practices, and complicit in them. In our firm opinion, this classes eBay as dishonest.
Collectively, we have a lower opinion of eBay than its individual members, many of whom are lazy dishonest crooks.
Advertising Portals Disguised as Expert Advice Sites
In the past few years, it has become less expensive to set up and run websites. It can be done at zero cost for smallish sites. At the same time, website production software has become better and cheaper, often free. Content Management Systems, including Wordpress and Joomla, are readily available at low or no cost. RSS feeds can supply ever changing "content" free of charge. Almost anybody who can read and write, and a few who obviously can't, can now publish their own "expert" website with only a few hours work. They do not even have to buy or borrow books, as most the the information they regurgitate can be quickly and easily found on the internet, using simple Google searches.
Most of these advertising portals are for eBay, as eBay supply a "developers program" and a "Partner Network". eBay will provide their API (Application Programming Interface) to developers, and encourage all to "Drive quality traffic to one of our partners and get paid for it" and "make money by driving traffic to eBay".
They will provide "Tools, Widgets & Links".
A blog contains
Murray Newlands’ Top Ten Tips for Writing Product Reviews 02 November 2009, and Successful Search Engine Marketing – 1. Selecting and Organizing Your Keywords
eBay's aim is to get website owners, existing and new to make money by pushing trade, mainly buyers, to eBay. According to eBay "Currently, the top 25 affiliates in the (affiliates) program average above $100,000 in monthly commissions".
Nowhere on eBay's advice and help sections does it mention that you should be an expert on the subject about which you write an article or advice, and neither does it mention that the advice should be honest and impartial.
eBay's affiliate programmes strike us as being like pyramid or network selling, paying people to recommend them. While we still naively believe or at least hope that the majority of people or honest, we can also see that there must be large numbers of others who, given the opportunity of making easy money, will sell their soul to the devil, and recommend whoever will pay them the most. no wonder there are a number of pseudo expert advice websites and blogs giving biased, wrong, unethical, and dishonest advice that eBay is the best / cheapest place to buy anything and everything.
Given the countless volumes of people complaining about being ripped off by both buyers and sellers on eBay, and by the failures of eBay "safe harbour" systems, and PayPal, all of which are unpaid and unsolicited, it is not difficult to imagine that most of the web owners who recommend eBay are only doing so for the money, and giving poor and misleading advice.
Needless to say, some of these "expert advice" sites are so lazy and dishonest that they create their site content by stealing our (and others') images, using, copying and re-hashing our content, always without giving any credit for its source. In most cases it is also difficult to identify the author and to check his level of experience or expertise, or to contact him.
Some of these advertising portals also earn money by linking to Google, which at least means a good quality targeted search, or other advertisers.
We would advise anybody using any of these pseudo expert advice sites to check the "About Me" pages of these sites, and to treat them with due caution if there is any lack of transparency about the sites owner, author, expertise, or experience.
The other big downside of the pseudo expert advice sites is that they dilute the quality of the internet, and make it harder for users to find the genuine, good quality websites, by spamming keywords almost meaninglessly. eBay have a keyword spamming tool for its associates to use.
Scrap Gold Buyers
During 2009, cash4gold.com grabbed attention by using high profile TV adverts to buy scrap gold (at rip-off prices). This spawned hundreds of me-too scrap gold buying entrepreneurs. Most of these seem to be small time chancers looking to make a fast buck out of suckers stupid enough to sell their old broken jewellery for a ridiculously low fraction of its actual value. These cowboys need a few nice photographs to give their websites and adverts the image and illusion of being an established professional dealer, so the quickest and easiest way is to steal the best gold coin photographs from other websites, which generally means ours.
Legal Action
We intend to take legal action against any and all of these, but international lawyers and legal action tend to be quite expensive, although we would obviously seek to recover costs and damages from the guilty parties. Meanwhile we think that giving the individuals, companies and websites some free publicity is in the public interest, and also quicker, cheaper, and possibly more effective than litigation. There are now almost 200 on our list. these include a few duplicates where the companies use different names, or the name of their website is different from the company. As the cost of getting a copyright infringement case to court is likely to exceed £100,000 per case, we would need to budget £20 million for legal fees if we were to proceed with legal action against all the above at the same time.
Copyright Infringements Remedies
Our suggested draft remedies for copyright abusers dependent on category - competitors, bloggers, pseudo-expert & advice sites acting as eBay & Google portals, eBay & other auction site sellers.
Copyright Abuse on eBay
Find More Items From the Same Seller. Bid or Buy Now!
This eBay Cross-Promotion and Marketing feature causes similar problems.
Auctiva, eBay & Copyright Theft
We suggest you read this link if you use Auctiva.
Copyright Abuse by Coin & Bullion Dealers, Jewellers & Other Traders
Original version, non-alphabetical.
Other Web Sites
All comments about copyright also cover content of all our other websites including, but not limited to:-
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