If you have ever been tempted to copy a competitor’s website text, the High Court has just given you a good reason not to.
In Airconco UK Ltd v DC Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Ltd [2026] EWHC 998 (Ch), handed down on 30 April 2026, HHJ Hacon dismissed an appeal against an award of £10,000 in damages for copyright infringement of website copy. The infringer had argued the right number was £1,020. The Court did not agree, and the reasoning has some useful lessons for any UK business that either invests in original web content or finds itself on the receiving end of a copyright letter.
The facts in short
Airconco operates a substantial website promoting domestic air conditioning installation. Its terms make clear that copying its text is forbidden and that anyone doing so is liable for licence fees at the rates published on the site. The advertised rate is £675 plus VAT per paragraph, per year, per use.
By the time of the appeal, infringement was not in dispute. DC Air had copied text from Airconco’s site and used it on its own. The fight was entirely about quantum.
At first instance in the IPEC Small Claims Track, District Judge Johnson found that DC Air had copied the equivalent of five paragraphs and had been using them for three years. Applying Airconco’s advertised rate, that came to 3 x 5 x £675 = £10,125, or £12,150 with VAT. Because the Small Claims Track has a £10,000 ceiling, the award was capped at £10,000.
The crucial evidential point at first instance was that Airconco was not merely waving its published rate at the court. A director of Airconco gave evidence that the company had rendered over 100 invoices to third parties and generated around £250,000 in licence fees. That is a real licensing business, not a paper one.
DC Air’s case was different. It produced written evidence from two professional copywriters who had been asked how much they would charge to create copy of the relevant nature and length from scratch. One estimated £465 to £540. The other estimated £850 plus VAT. Either way, DC Air said, the right damages figure was around £1,020. Neither copywriter attended trial to be cross-examined.
The legal framework: General Tire
The starting point for damages in copyright cases, and most intellectual property infringement cases, is General Tire & Rubber Co v Firestone Tyre & Rubber Co Ltd [1975] 1 WLR 819. Lord Wilberforce identified three alternative approaches.
The first is lost profits, used where the claimant trades the work and has lost sales because of the infringer. The second is the going licence rate, used where the claimant exploits the rights by licensing and has an established royalty. The third is the hypothetical licence, used where there is no established rate and the court must construct what a willing licensor and willing licensee would have agreed.
HHJ Hacon was clear at paragraph 24 that the third approach is normally a fallback, to be used only where the first two are not available on the facts. He gave the practical reason: the first two approaches provide a firm basis for estimating loss; the third is less certain and likely to be more expensive, because it requires a wider gathering of evidence.
What HHJ Hacon decided
The central question on appeal was whether the District Judge was right to apply the second General Tire approach rather than the third. DC Air ran three grounds.
The first ground was that the District Judge had failed to give proper weight to the lack of evidence demonstrating the value of Airconco’s licensing business. HHJ Hacon rejected this on the facts. There was evidence: published rates, more than 100 invoices, around £250,000 of paid licence fees, and five earlier judgments in which the courts had awarded Airconco damages based on its standard licence fee. That is not the picture of a paper licensing programme.
The more interesting strand of the first ground was DC Air’s argument that Airconco’s licences were “tainted” because they had largely been collected under the shadow of litigation. There is real authority behind this point. Lord Wilberforce in General Tire (at 825-6) made clear that before a “going rate” can be taken as the basis for an infringer’s liability, the circumstances of those past licences must be comparable to the hypothetical bargain the court is constructing. Royalties negotiated by way of settlement, where the validity of the right was in doubt, are not comparable.
HHJ Hacon accepted that principle but found it did not help DC Air. At paragraph 32 he held that the fact that some licensees had paid under threat of litigation did not strip those payments of relevance. The key point was that no licensee had ever challenged Airconco’s advertised rate as unfairly high. They might have been reluctant to pay anything at first, but having decided to pay, they paid the going rate without challenge. He also noted, as DJ Johnson had, that not all of the invoices were connected to litigation in the first place.
The second and third grounds went together. DC Air argued that the District Judge should have applied the third General Tire approach and based damages on the cost of commissioning original copy from a copywriter, relying on Peninsular Business Services Ltd v Citation plc [2004] FSR 17. HHJ Hacon dispatched this briefly. The third approach is a fallback. Because the second was available on the facts, the third did not arise.
He also added, at paragraph 36, a useful evidential point for anyone running this kind of appeal: even if the third approach had been taken, neither of the two copywriters had attended trial to be cross-examined, and the District Judge would have been entitled to give their written evidence little or no weight.
A point that deserves emphasis: goodwill and search engine ranking
One observation by the District Judge, which HHJ Hacon endorsed, is worth pulling out for any business audience. Licensing an existing piece of text is not the same as commissioning a new piece of text. The existing text comes with the benefit of the goodwill and search engine performance that the original owner has built up over time. By copying Airconco’s text, DC Air was not just saving the cost of a copywriter. It was free-riding on the Google rankings, click-through and lead generation that Airconco had paid to build.
That commercial reality is precisely why the “I could have got a copywriter for £540” argument was always going to struggle. It compares the wrong things.
The costs lesson
One final point worth flagging. Airconco won the appeal. Mr Salmon, a director of Airconco, had run the appeal himself and submitted a costs schedule based on his time at £212 per hour. The IPEC Small Claims Track costs regime, which HHJ Hacon held applied to the appeal by analogy with CPR 27.14(i), does not allow that. The most that could be awarded for a half-day video hearing was £47.50, calculated on the £95 per day loss of earnings cap in Practice Direction 27A paragraph 7.3.
In other words, the successful party recovered damages of £10,000 but only £47.50 of costs. Anyone choosing the Small Claims Track for the procedural simplicity and the costs protection it offers the loser needs to understand that the protection cuts both ways. If you win, you keep your damages, but the legal and management time you spent getting there is largely on you.
Why this matters for businesses
There are three practical takeaways.
First, original website copy is a valuable asset and the courts will treat it as such. There is no rule that website text is worth less than any other copyright work. Damages turn on what the claimant could have charged for a licence, not on what a freelancer would have charged to write something different. And as Airconco shows, a licence fee of £675 per paragraph per year per use is enforceable if you can show that real third parties pay it.
Second, published licence terms work, and a licensing business builds itself. The decision is a strong endorsement of the approach Airconco has taken: state clearly and prominently on the site that unauthorised copying triggers a licence fee at a published rate, then enforce those terms and collect payment. If you do that consistently, you build the evidence that supports the second General Tire approach the next time someone copies you. The case also makes clear that licensees who settle under litigation pressure are still licensees, provided they have not actually disputed the rate as unfair.
Third, the “I would never have paid that much” defence has limits. The hypothetical bargain is between the actual parties, taking into account the actual commercial value of the existing work, including the goodwill and search ranking that go with it. It is not a bargain between the infringer and the cheapest copywriter available. And in any event, the third approach only opens up if the second is not.
What to do now
If you run a website with original content of real commercial value, three things are worth getting into place this week. Publish a clear copyright notice and a stated licence fee for unauthorised use, accessible from every page of the site. Keep records of every third party who has paid you a licence fee, whether voluntarily, under threat of proceedings or in settlement of them, because those invoices are evidence. And keep an eye on your sector: a clear terms page, prior paid invoices and a measured letter before action will, between them, do most of the work.
If you have received a letter from a website owner alleging that you have copied their content, do not assume the damages will be trivial. Take advice early. The cheapest moment to deal with a claim of this kind is before proceedings are issued, and in light of Airconco v DC Air, the comfortable old assumption that “it is only a bit of website text, it cannot be worth much” no longer holds.
The full judgment of Airconco UK Ltd v DC Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Ltd [2026] EWHC 998 (Ch) is available on the National Archives caselaw site at caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk.