If one image is used but across 4 products for sale and we discover it is copyrighted … is it one infringement, 4 infringements or whatever number of items sold as infringement
Alasdair Taylor's Answer
Particular acts of copyright infringement under English law are defined in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Acts of infringement include copying a protected work and communicating a protected work to the public.
It follows, I think, that in the case of an image used to sell a number of products online, the total number of infringements (which I take to be synonymous with acts of infringement) will depend upon the exact ways in which the images have been processed – and could clearly be many multiples of the number of products.
The question you ask does leave me wondering why the number of infringements matters. I can imaging the question could come up in the context of the interpretation of a contract (e.g. because the contract distinguished between an infringement and multiple infringements) but in most situations it won’t really matter how many “technical” infringements can be counted.