Allgold Coins eBay Shop & Copyright Theft
The Allgold Coins eBay shop uses one of our high quality photographs in its logo / banner in breach of our copyright. Not content with simply using our photographs occasionally to sell its stock on eBay, this eBay PowerSeller, a so-called pillar of the eBay community, according to eBay, stole one of our highly recognisable photographs to use as part of their logo for their eBay shop, and later, their eBid shop.
Many eBay sellers, including dealers steal our copyright images, we suspect some of them may also be fraudsters. Does eBay care?
Allgold Coins eBay Shop Logo
Our 1958 Sovereign Reverse Image
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Ignored Warning
We wrote a formal notice to Clive King, owner or partner in Allgold of Essex or Allgold Coins, on 12th November 2009, headed "Notification of infringement of copyright".
We asked, inter alia, for him to comply with certain conditions, including a solemn undertaking, and the removal of any other Chard copyright material from hnis websites, eBay and other web pages, and stated that "We note other images which we believe are ours, or copies of our photographs, which may have been altered, resized, edited or otherwise modified. As the original image is subject to copyright, then all derived, sampled, or modified versions of the original are also subject to copyright. We are in process of carrying out a forensic examination of the above, and believe we can identify at least one such example".
We gave King 7 days to comply, otherwise we would take legal action without further notice. We also strongly advised him to take legal advice.
To date, we have not received the required undertaking, nor has the image referred to above been removed.
We do not know whether this is because King is stupid enough or stubborn enough to ignore our very reasonable requests, whether he thiinks we are so stupid that we cannot recognise our own photographs, or whether his policy on sourcing images is so lax, sloppy, and careless, that he does not know whose images he has stolen from where.
Neither has he telephoned or contacted us in any other way, to ask which further image we were referring to.
At the time we wrote to him, we had not identified which of our thousands of gold sovereign photographs he had used, but were 99.9% certain that his logo had been created using a copy of one of our photographs.
We have now positively identified it as our 1958 sovereign reverse, as shown to the right.
If you care to compare the images, you should be able to recognise numerous similarities and features shared by both images. This is because King's logo has been created by modifying a copy of our photograph.
How Many?
We do not know for certain how long King has been using our photo in his logo, but we checked some completed eBay listings (up to 90 days old), and discovered that they also used the same logo.
King has about 810 current eBay listings, and we believe that they all use our photograph as part of his banner / logo twice in each listing. This appears to have been happening for at least 3 months. We know this particular photograph was taken in November 2007, so it entirely possible that King has been using it for as long as two years.
Enhances Allgold's Image - Detracts from Ours
King use of our high quality photograph for his logo enhances his image as a professional looking dealer who can afford to use high quality artwork, and at the same time demeans and diminishes our public image by proliferating our photographs, and making them seem common and ordinary. If his customers were to see his logo, then our photograph, they may assume there was a connection, thereby passing himself off as being authorised by or connected to us. They may also think, perhaps subliminally, that our photographs were similar to, or copied from, King's eBay pages.
Power Sellers - Pillars of the eBay Community?
Yet another dishonest eBay PowerSeller.
Feedback 6,126 - 99.8% Positive.
More to follow...
Allgold of Sevenoaks Website
In October 2009, we also noticed another of our images being used on Allgold's website. It's actually one of our older, and less good, images, which dates back to November 2004. since then, we have re-photographed most of the coins on our websites and replaced them with bigger, better images.
Copyright Notice
Please see our "Copyright" page for further information.
Buying Gold Coins & Bars on eBay
Selling Gold Coins & Bars on eBay
Copyright Thieves on eBay
We already have a page naming and shaming dealers using our images without permission. It's time we did the same for eBay, although if we include them all, this could be a very long page.
Alphabetical Listing of Other Copyright Theft Sites
Other Scams
Other Web Sites
All comments about copyright also cover content of all our other websites including, but not limited to:-
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