Dear Sir,
You appear to have used our copyright images without our permission.
We have reported this to ebay who should cancel your auction.
We have placed a a bid on you item, and intend to deduct £200 charge for use of the images from the purchase price.
We suggest you cancel the auction without waiting for ebay to do so in time.
Regards,
Lawrence Chard, Chard (1964) Limited, 521 Lytham Road, Blackpool, Lancashire, FY4 1RJ, England, UK,
Telephone 0044 (0)1253 343081, www.chards.co.uk, (and our e-mail address).

Our Response
Dear Norma,
The image that you used is one of our pictures taken from one of our websites. 
You state that "the image is freely available on Google".  May I ask exactly what you searched for in Google?  I think you will find that the URL the image is taken from is one of our websites, which will show that we do hold the copyright of the image.
You also state that "There is no way I will pay you 200 pounds ( $ 370.00)".  If this is the case, may I ask what solution you would suggest?
Regards, (chard)

Her Reply
Dear Caroline
If you look under "Images" on the google site, type in "Krugerrand" you will find numerous photos of these coins, all with the website named underneath the coin but with NO statement that the image is copyright to the particular website.  The particular one I used is for a site called taxfreegold.uk  If the image I used  has indeed been copyrighted to you I will profusely apologise for the fact that Google does NOT state that the image is copyright and will NOT use that particular image in future.
Regards, Norma Weight

Our Response
When you signed up with eBay as a seller, you signed an agreement that you had read and understood eBay's terms and conditions.
At URL http://pages.ebay.com/help/confidence/vero-image-text-theft.html, you will find eBay state:-

Item Description and Picture Theft
eBay members are not allowed to use another eBay user's pictures or descriptions in their listings or About Me page without the owner's permission. Listings that violate eBay's Picture and Description Theft policy may be removed early. Multiple violations of this policy can result in suspension.
The following examples are not allowed on eBay.

• A seller doesn't know the best way to describe an item. The seller copies a substantial amount of another's description and pastes it into a listing.
• A seller takes someone else's picture and includes it in a listing since it looks very similar to the item the seller is offering.
• A seller likes the way a competitor's About Me page looks. The seller copies the look and feel and a substantial amount of the text and creates an About Me page.

Report another member who is using your text or images without your permission

You may also have noticed, but more likely ignored, the fact that when you first supply an image to use in your eBay listing, a window opens warning you about copyright, and asking you to confirm that the image you are supplying does not infringe copyright.

You state that the image is freely available on the internet, and you blame Google for failing to tell you the image is copyright. When you use Google image search, then click on an image, the following messages appear at or near the top of your screen:

image has been scaled down. See full-size image.
(Image URL)
(Image information)
This image may be subject to copyright

When you click on the link, you will find the following message on our Tax Free Gold website.

Gold Krugerrands - Bigger Pictures - Obverse (or Reverse)
Large photographs of krugerrand.
All our images are copyright.
Krugers Info

Theft is Still Theft
We would like to tell you that theft is still theft, whether the owner has placed a "Do Not Steal" notice on the item or not. We are not under any obligation to you to tell you not to steal or borrow our image. If you want to use somebody else's image the obligation to ensure that you are not infringing their copyright is entirely yours.
Let's give you an example which is hopefully simple enough for you to understand.
We assume you own a car. You park it somewhere, and you expect it to be in the same place when you return. Somebody decides they like your car, so drive off in it. You quite rightly get annoyed about this and report the theft to the police. Some time later, the police find your car, and the thief claims that he had not stolen it, he had only borrowed it, and there was no sign on it saying "do not steal this car". He adds that cars are freely available on the streets or car parks in your neighborhood. When the case gets to court, and he gets fined, and you ask for compensation, he accuses you of extortion because he does not agree with your assessment of the loss or offence caused to you. You would quite rightly consider the culprit to be a dishonest unworthy member of the community, and should be punished. Are you acting any differently?

Fair Compensation
First, if you have not already done so, please read our page EBay Copyright Theft.
Now, we can tell you that the image you used took me, Lawrence Chard, a whole day to obtain, although this does include obverse (front side), and reverse (back). We did this because we had been requested to supply them, under license, to a publisher. The publisher paid us, if I remember correctly £200, for permission to use them for one single use their specified purpose only. It would be unfair to charge them, but let you use the images for free.
I run a business with about $10 million annual sales. Although I have help, it is basically a one-man business, and it is my effort which generates the income to pay our staff, and all the operating expenses of the business. I do not normally hire myself out as a lawyer would, but if I did so, my hourly fee would be at least £100 per hour, and this amount would not match what I need to earn for the business. I also work up to 12 hours per day. I did not ask you to borrow or use our photographs, I would prefer that you had not done so in the first place, but you have done so, and that was dishonest, selfish and inconsiderate of you. There was a very good chance you would get away with it and not get caught, in which case we would have got no compensation. Not only that, but your eBay krugerrand competed with our eBay sales of similar coins, so you used our image to compete with us. Presumably you still think that is fair, well we do not. Like the car thief, if you get caught, you should expect to pay a penalty and not just a fair use rate.
Ask a professional photographer how much he would charge to take a photograph of your coin. We would be very surprised if you could get the same quality images for under £100, and £1,000 would be more like. Consider that we carefully selected a very good quality krugerrand from a large quantity, then we photographed it, using professional equipment. We bought one lens especially for photographing coins of between 10 and 40 millimetres in diameter, most professional photographers would not own a similar special purpose lens. we light it using a Nikon ringflash which again many professionals would not have. We have spent years learning how to get good coin photographs, most professionals would need to learn. We spent hours in software processing of the raw image before we were satisfied it was good enough. We believe the figure we quoted, £200 is a very modest and reasonable one. If we need to take this matter to court in order to enforce payment, we will ask for a greater amount, and we will almost certainly be awarded it. The legal fees, for which you will be responsible, will be many times more than this amount. If you are in any doubt about it, then we advise you to consult a lawyer, his advice will almost certainly be to pay up quickly.

Follow Up
Some time after we posted the above, we did a quick check to see of the same person was using any more of our images. As we could not find any current listing for her, we looked at her feedback at : http://feedback.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll, and found that after 3 transactions, she had a feedback of -2, the other feedback being a neutral. eBay don't show an overall percentage rating, but it would be -100%!