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Are you liable if your web developer copies someone else’s images onto your website? Usually you are, because it’s your website showing the images to the public, and a developer building it for you is likely to be treated as acting for you, so what they know about the images counts as what you know. A fencing retailer in Bolton has just been ordered to pay £7,000 in damages, plus interest and £13,704.50 towards the other side’s costs, for 20 product images which it said its developer used as placeholders and forgot to take out.
The case is Charles and Ivy Ltd v Chelsea Supplies Ltd [2026] EWHC 2556 (IPEC), decided on 9 October 2026 by Her Honour Judge Melissa Clarke in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court. Chelsea Supplies had admitted infringement, so the hearing was only about damages. It’s the same judge who decided Tipping v Smith, where reposting magazine photos on social media cost £134,666, and the sums here are much smaller, but this is the more useful case if you’ve paid someone else to build your website.
What happened
Charles and Ivy sells fencing from Middleton, about 17 miles from Chelsea Supplies, and had paid a CGI artist to produce a large library of product images. Chelsea Supplies, which had sold radiators and valves online since 2021, decided to move into composite fencing and in March 2025 hired a developer, said to be in Pakistan, to build the new pages. They went live on 31 May 2025 with 20 of Charles and Ivy’s images on them. Charles and Ivy found them through a Google alert around 12 June and sent a letter of claim the same day. The images were all down by 22 July, but Chelsea Supplies didn’t offer undertakings until the day before the case management conference in April 2026.
Blaming the web developer
Chelsea Supplies said the developer had used the images as placeholders while the site was built, meaning to swap them for CGI images it had commissioned at about $3 each, and that 20 were left in by mistake. The judge didn’t accept that, partly because its director said he’d had no dealings with the developer during the build and couldn’t say how he knew any of this, and she thought it unlikely that a developer in Pakistan would find images of the exact products on a competitor’s site a few miles away without being pointed there. She found that an employee had probably directed the developer to Charles and Ivy’s site, and that the images were used because Chelsea Supplies had none of its own for those products.
Chelsea Supplies had admitted the developer was its agent, and a company is fixed with what its agent knows while doing the job, as well as with what its employees know. Professionally produced images of specific products, taken from a nearby competitor, aren’t stock images, and the judge found the developer and staff had at least reason to believe they were protected by copyright.
It didn’t help that Chelsea Supplies’ disclosure statement said it hadn’t searched for any documents before May 2025 or for electronic documents at all, that it never named the developer, and that its explanations for the missing emails didn’t match. The judge found it more likely than not that the correspondence with the developer would have undermined its account.
How the £7,000 was worked out
There was no reliable evidence of lost sales, so both sides agreed the measure was a reasonable licence fee for the use actually made. Charles and Ivy asked for half the £15,875 cost of creating the images, and Chelsea Supplies said a few thousand pounds at most. The judge settled on £4,000, about £200 an image. She reasoned that Chelsea Supplies could have delayed its launch until it had its own images, and that Charles and Ivy wouldn’t have been keen to license its marketing images to a local competitor, so £4,000 was about the most Chelsea Supplies would have paid to keep its launch date. She counted the use from around the end of April 2025, when the images were uploaded during development, and not just from when the pages went live.
She added £3,000 of additional damages under section 97(2) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The developer had shown at least a “couldn’t care less” attitude to Charles and Ivy’s rights, which made the infringement flagrant, and that was fixed on Chelsea Supplies through the agency. The images had also given it a head start on its new fencing business, which counted as a benefit even without proven extra profit, and she took the poor disclosure and late undertakings into account. The award was kept modest because the images were up for a short time and came down quickly once Chelsea Supplies was told.
Costs
The liability costs alone are nearly double the damages, Charles and Ivy has also been awarded its costs of the damages inquiry, and Chelsea Supplies will have its own lawyers to pay, so the total comes to a great deal more than the £4,000 licence would have cost. IPEC caps the costs a winner can recover at each stage, which keeps the bill down but still leaves it well above the damages in a small case like this.
If you’re having a website built
Before the site goes live, ask your developer in writing where every image, video and piece of text came from, and treat anything they can’t account for as a problem. The development contract should say that everything supplied is original or properly licensed to you and give you a right to recover from the developer if it isn’t, although that’s of little use if you can’t find them later, so keep their name, contact details and invoices with your records. If a letter of claim arrives, take the material down, offer sensible undertakings promptly and stop any routine deletion of emails and messages.
If it’s your images being copied, the first thing to check is that you own them. Here the artist only assigned the copyright to Charles and Ivy’s holding company in July 2025, a few weeks after the copying was found, so it’s worth getting a written assignment when you commission the work.
I help businesses with the contracts and intellectual property that settle who owns the content on their website, including web development agreements and copyright assignments. I don’t run copyright claims myself; those go to my Nexa colleagues who handle intellectual property disputes. Get in touch if you need some help.
Written by Steven Mather, a business solicitor acting on company sales and purchases. This is general information about the law, not legal advice on your situation. Law correct as at .
