The confusion started one afternoon last week, with the gentle ping of my phone as a new email came in. Things have been pretty quiet recently — what with moving countries and trying to get our house sorted out — so I quickly opened up my messages to see what had come in.

The mail, it turned out, was from somebody I’d never met. I’ll call him C.

C said he was the vice president of an American company that helps businesses do nice things for the environment. That sounded pleasant enough. I imagined having a cup of tea and a biscuit with him while he explained the specifics.

What he went on to say, however, was a bit of a surprise.

“It has come to my attention that you have a photo on your flicker web page that is being claimed by one of my employees. Specifically it is:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bojo/315780932/

Since we were planning to use it for some of our promotional material, we are requesting a statement from you that it is not your photo and request that you remove it from the flicker site.  Would that be possible?”

Here’s the photo they’re talking about — a shot taken in November 2006 in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park.

Well, I can tell you that set me thinking. This was definitely my photograph — and my holiday. And yet here was somebody asking me to take it down from the web because somebody else had said it belonged to them. I sent back a forthright email: it’s my photo, your employee is wrong, I’m not taking it down and you don’t have permission to use it.

The whole thing was a little ironic, since it was originally released under a Creative Commons license that allowed them to use it for anything they wanted — just as long as they attributed it to me. But since they were claiming ownership, I was going to tell them otherwise.

Shortly afterwards, a response came through that essentially reiterated the first position. To paraphrase: “Thanks for getting back to us, we realise that you say you own it, but our employee still says it belongs to them”. This wasn’t just an accusation of plagiarism, but of outright untruth. Only one of us could have taken that exact picture, with that exact landscape and that exact shower of light coming through the clouds onto the savannah.

Fortunately, C had come up with an ingenious way to tell who was lying:

“What I have found as I began to look into this is that the only pictures floating around are 800x600 res.  The person with the full resolution shot is most likely the owner.  Do you have the full res image?  If so would you be willing to send it to me via email?  I would take personal responsibility to ensure that anyone who sees it protects your copyright.”

He was right: nobody but the owner should have access to a higher res version. But not only did I not have access to the originals (my archives were, at that point, somewhere halfway across the Atlantic) but despite his assurances, I was concerned what might happen. If they had a high resolution copy of the image, what was to stop them abusing it further? If they already had some unscrupulous employees, perhaps they’d just rip me off. This was only a couple of days after the Cooks Source shenanigans blew up, after all.

So I sent back a long (very long) response. I will admit it tended towards facetiousness in a couple of places. It also pulled out the fact that I am pretty well acquainted with copyright law, what with being a professional writer, and didn’t want to pull the lawyers out on them.

But it was essentially an attempt to underline my authenticity as owner.

An excerpt:

“I think it may be time for you to consider the possibility that your employee, whether through error or malice, has claimed ownership incorrectly. I have no reason to claim ownership falsely and no ulterior motive to drag this conversation on longer than necessary. Had you merely been asking permission to use the image, I would have responded very differently: I am usually happy to license my work, and have done so before.”

“She, on the other hand, may be mistaken that it is her picture (memory can play tricks on us all) or, rather more unhappily, trying to cover up a previous mistake. In either case, the salient facts do not change: it is my photograph and you are not entitled to use it without my permission.”

The truth is, however, that beyond my protestations I really only had circumstantial evidence to hand — a little Flickr metadata, another picture taken seconds later — and the strength of my conviction. It could easily become a he-said-she-said situation, and then I wouldn’t have much hard evidence to back me up.

C wrote back saying that he had been looking at my other images and was pretty sure his employee wasn’t telling the truth. “I am of the belief that the picture is yours,” he said, adding mysteriously that “there has been more obfuscation, like maybe someone else’s camera was used”.

“At this point it is now a internal issue that we are addressing.   Claiming someone else’s work is unacceptable.  Please accept my deepest apology for pulling you into this.  And even more so, please accept my and my colleagues apologies for having to question your legitimate ownership of the image.  Most of us spend our lives protecting our good names and it can be upsetting and frustrating  when a stranger comes out of the blue making unsubstantiated claims.”

That’s a good response. I was pleased and told him so.

But despite the happy resolution, I was left asking myself a few questions.

What if they believed their employee, not me? I’ve already questioned the way files and images get passed on in digital form and lose their original attribution. So what was to stop the company sticking by their guns?

How do we prove ownership? How can we stop honest people getting slammed by the unscrupulous?