The perennial tale about church fundraising is that it's to rebuild the steeple. But one church in Lichfield, Staffordshire, faced a different fundraising problem: to pay a £6,000 bill demanded for photographs used on its website. The case came to the attention of Gavin Drake, the communications director for the diocese's 600 churches. In creating the church's website, a volunteer had included a couple of images sourced from Getty, a large picture agency, without paying for them. A couple of months later, Getty sent the church a demand for £6,000.

"The issue is not that photographs are free on the net for anyone to use, but that enforcement has to be done properly. Getty was basically bullying," Drake says. A former freelance journalist, he adds: "I know the value of images."

Offer declined

Drake told the church they'd been foolish. "I then tried to talk to Getty about it, and their policy was 'they're our pictures, we'll charge what we want to charge'. I worked through the process and pricing system and came up with a couple of hundred pounds. On behalf of the church, I offered Getty that amount if that was what they would commercially charge, and they declined and insisted they wanted the whole lot. I pointed out some recent court cases in which photographers' images had been used wilfully by national publications - over a period of time and many images. They had had to pay much less than this and therefore if they wished to take it to court they could explain why the images were worth it."

After some back and forth, in which Getty offered to take half, Drake says: "In the end I said to the church that Getty was not playing ball or following the normal litigation or dispute resolution procedures and to ignore them. We don't deal with bullies; we deal with legal threats appropriately. I told them by letter that's what they were doing, that we were not going to play, and didn't hear any more." Drake now regularly reminds all churches to ensure that all the images they use are fully licensed.

Dozens of small businesses and charities tell similar stories. On the online forums run by the Federation of Small Businesses, copyright infringement blows away every other subject. Many of those posting on the federation's forum have tried to do everything right; they aren't arguing about copyright. It's the enforcement tactics they find objectionable. Two years ago Brian Weir of Toucher Web Design received a letter from another picture agency, Corbis, via the law firm Baker & McKenzie, accusing him of stealing a vector graphic and demanding £2,400.

"It was the image of a shopping cart," he says. When the letter arrived, he removed the graphic and sourced a new one from istockphoto.com (since bought by Getty) for less than $5 (£3.30).

"I really took fright when I saw it at first," he says. Besides the financial threat, there's the reputation damage: "I don't want to be associated with copyright theft, whether they're right or wrong." When negotiating failed, he didn't pay up; he's heard nothing further.

Small organisations are the ones at risk. Large companies have in-house staff to design websites and check copyright status. Small ones may commission a volunteer or a cut-price designer, download a template, assume they have rights to images on a purchased CD or included with software, or thoughtlessly copy a small graphic.

Letters demanding large sums are scary, and it's not surprising if many recipients settle. Those posting on the federation's forum say that requests for a breakdown of the charges or proof of ownership, or responses that the image came as part of a paid-for template, are all ignored.

The virtual law firm Limeone has dealt with more than 300 of Getty's infringement claims, plus some from Corbis, primarily for clients where the original source of the images is unclear. Says Janine Hughes of Limeone: "Once we get involved generally Getty does back off. I think the main problem Getty has is proving when images came into their possession. It's clear in some of our dealings with them that they have practical problems in establishing that. It's a massive problem for them with respect to evidence."

Out of their depth

So far none of LimeOne's clients has been taken to court, not even the limited company that was asked for £50,000 in damages. Hughes directs people to the Court Service website, which lays out the rules for making intellectual property claims.

Instead of issuing court proceedings Getty commonly sends in a debt collector. "They will turn up on the premises, and a lot of small businesses feel out of their depth," says Hughes.

Corbis's senior counsel, Claire Keeley, says many infringements are reported by the photographers themselves. Some are found by the sales team. More are found via Digimark's digital watermarking and the spidering service Picscout. Keeley notes that one (unidentified) vendor Corbis works with nets a "small portion" of the recovered money.

She says: "I would hope that people wouldn't be intimidated, but we have to walk a fine line - we have to make it clear that it's important and necessary." Ultimately, she adds: "My goal is to make my job obsolete. The ideal scenario is we have businesses properly licensing these images through sales channels." Alison Crombie of Getty says: "The thing we try to do is just have a conversation with the customer. We make them aware that it has happened and that they need to look at addressing it and making sure it's licensed. It goes into writing at the point when there's denial of use or people saying they didn't know."

Most of the time, she says, "that gets resolved." As for the valuations, "we only send out our bills according to what average usage would cost". And, she says: "We do negotiate with people, if people genuinely make a mistake."

Numbers 'not plausible'

Despite Crombie's conviction that "whatever we're doing it definitely will be legal", it's uncertain whether sending in a debt collector, or the company's valuations, would stand up in court. Nicholas Bohm of the Law Society says: "It certainly isn't a debt in any legal analysis. You can't incur a debt unless you have consented to it. It makes them liable for damages, but it's not a debt." The amount, he says, "can only be quantified by agreement or by the judgement of a court".

In the UK, he says, court awards "ought to be supposedly reflective of the claimant's loss." A lot depends on what the market rates are. "If they can get $10 a day for a licence for five years and people are actually paying them, then there is a genuine market out there and they have a basis for saying this is what it's worth." But, he says: "The numbers mentioned don't seem plausible to me."

They don't seem plausible to photographer Tony Sleep (halftone.co.uk) either. "In the UK they'd struggle to make these amounts stick," he says. "UK law is only concerned with restoring the situation had licensing been correctly obtained. The courts don't like to be used as a means of extortion."

Drake says: "I understand the difficulty companies like Getty have and photographers have - they have a product that needs to be protected. But where is the Getty publicity campaign? Why aren't they issuing press releases and education to remind people that these images are not to be used?"

Media companies using the image library sites know the rules. "But it's not about media companies any more - it's kids, churches, schools." Getty, he says needs "to run a media campaign".