Pixsy Inc and Marco Verch

[Guest]

OK, so we spoke to a lady in the summer who had found an email in her spam box from a company called Pixsy Inc. This business is based in Berlin Germany. The email was from someone called Tom. They asked for a sum of £249 for apparently taking a photograph and posting it on a blog the photograph was apparently taken by Marco Verch.

A former district judge friend of ours has told us that, if this case ever makes it to court, then the defense is that the photographer has to ensure that they can account for all copies of their photograph. It could have been sourced from anywhere. The photographer could have given permission to you via a phone call or word of mouth. Where is the evidence?
As a result, cases will automatically be dismissed on this ground and the photographer will have significant legal fees to pay which could be around the £5000 mark in the UK for recovering the theoretical full amount which is in this case would be £249. High risk and low return.

A reasonable course of action is to simply communicate between parties and ask them to remove the image if said photographer is not happy. My advice is to simply right click on that email and send it promptly to the spam box and then delete all of these emails promptly. Don’t open their email or acknowledge it. Do not click on any link that comes from them.

As we are quite local, I visited their London office, and nobody has ever heard of them. When I checked the phone number, there is a redirect that sends it to Berlin Germany.

Pixsy AND Marco Verch are playing a very dangerous game. You see the courts will see straight through this straight away, their operating capital is unfortunately from the people who they terrify. The true crime is sending threatening emails and baiting. This is particularly the case with Pixsy and Marco Verch.

If someone from Berlin sent you an email pretending to be from London using a false name of an employee who does not exist, then this is very unusual. This unusual format and the threat should give you a clue that it is a scam. There will never be any physical letter sent to you as they are required to do by law.

We wrote to Pixsy three times, twice by our trusty Protonmail email and once by physical copy. Surprise, surprise they did not reply.

[Sarma Sniper]

I received an email today from the same company - Pixsy Inc. Apparently, they have an office in Sydney. The email was from someone called Marketa Cenkerová, a Case Manager. She asked for a sum of AUD $1,250 by the 15th March for apparently breach of copyright. By me posting an image on my FB business page. The image apparently is subject to copyright, owned by Marco Verch. When googling their website, business name & address, it's almost like they don't actually exist!

[R0b]

Pixsy are a bunch of chancers, they are no more than the equivalent of a debt collection company and are generally harmless. Not seen them issue legal proceedings before especially where the copyright owner and user of the image are in different countries but there is a small chance they could.

Best bet is to ignore them and they will go away eventually but as you have already communicated with them, you may want to tell them that liability is denied and you will no longer communicate with except where legal proceedings have commenced.

It would also be sensible to take down the image in question immediately because if you haven't got the owner's permission, you are likely in breach of copyright laws either in England and Wales or some other country. You don't have a right to copy an image from the internet without permission and even if you do have permission, most of the time you have to credit the owner.