Use of an image from my website without permission

fabbydabby

Hi,

I hope someone here can help me.

I am a irish manufacturer and have spent lots of money on a nice website with nice graphics depicting my product, which sells quite well. We don't sell direct to the public, we sell through dealers.

However, a local dealer has lifted an image of my product off my website and he sends it out with all his quotes. But he doesn't actually sell my product, he sells a cheaper and inferior alternative. He has placed a sort of 'disclaimer' underneath our image which claims that the image is just a 'generic representation'.

As I see it the problems I have with what this guy is doing are as follows:
1) The customer is getting an inferior product, not mine and is being mislead
2) He does not have my permission to use my image, which i paid a lot to have designed in 3D modelling software
3) Aside from that, the image is actually being used to help sell our competitors product!

This is maddening for me, as you can imagine, and I really hope that someone here can advise me what my options are. I don't want to involve litigation as it is expensive and time consuming, I just want to make him stop.

He is unliklely to stop with me just asking him however.

Sorry about the vagueness, I don't want to implicate anyone! I am not looking for legal advise per se, just what you think of the issue and if I can do anything about it like...

Tom Young

Talk to a solicitor.