Copyright disputes
Somebody used your work without asking. Your realistic options are a platform takedown, an invoice, a formal letter, or court proceedings. They differ enormously in cost and in what they recover, and for most individual creators the honest answer is that only the first two make financial sense.
Take evidence first
Before contacting anyone, capture what exists now: dated screenshots showing the use in context and the full URL, an Archive.org capture if there is one, and the page as a saved file. Infringing material disappears quickly once the user knows they have been noticed, and then you have a claim you cannot prove.
Also gather proof that the work is yours: original files with metadata, layered source files, dated backups, and the first publication date.
Option 1: platform takedown
Free, fast, and usually effective. Every major platform has a notice-and-takedown process, and hosts in the EU lose their liability protection under the Digital Services Act if they do not act on valid notices.
This is the right first move when the use is on a platform: a marketplace listing, a social account, a video, a print-on-demand product. It gets the work removed. It gets you no money.
Filing a false or careless notice has consequences, so be sure the use is actually infringing rather than quotation, parody or another exception.
Option 2: send an invoice
Underused and often the most practical. Many infringements are careless rather than deliberate: an agency that pulled an image from a search, a small business that did not think about it.
Invoicing at your normal licence rate converts an infringement into a sale. It costs you nothing to try, it frequently works, and it preserves the relationship.
Option 3: a formal letter
A letter from a lawyer setting out your rights and demanding the use stops, plus payment for use to date. Priced per case at €200 an hour, so usually one to three hours.
This is proportionate where the infringer is a business with something to lose and the sum at stake is meaningful. It is not proportionate against an individual reposting your work on social media.
Option 4: court proceedings
Expensive, slow, and rarely justified by the value of a single infringement. In most EU states you can recover damages and, if you win, some costs. You will still be out of pocket in time and risk.
It makes sense where the infringement is commercial and continuing, the sums are large, or the infringer has ignored everything else.
What your claim is realistically worth
Usually the licence fee you would have charged, sometimes multiplied where the infringement was flagrant, plus removal of the work. Statutory damages of the kind available in the United States do not exist in most EU systems.
If your normal licence fee is €200, the claim is worth around €200. That is the number to weigh against the cost of pursuing it, and it is why the invoice route is usually the right one.
AI training
Whether using copyright works to train AI models requires permission is unsettled and being litigated across several jurisdictions. The EU text and data mining exception in the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive allows a rights holder to reserve their rights, which is what "opt out" signals attempt to do.
If this affects your work, the practical steps today are to reserve rights explicitly in your terms and in your licences, and to state the position on your site. We can draft that.
What we do
We tell you honestly which of the four routes fits, including when the answer is that pursuing it costs more than it recovers. Then we do the work at €200 an hour with an estimate agreed first.