23rd September 2024
We allow people who are genuinely considering purchasing an instrument from us to download individual photographs to inform their decision-making process. The watermark of our ‘swan’ logo must not be removed from these photographs.
We sometimes permit individual photographs from our website to be reproduced online in the context of scholarly debate – on Maestronet for instance – if watermarked and accompanied by a link to the source page. Contact us in advance if you wish to use our images, either online or in a print context.
If you have purchased an instrument or bow from us you are, of course, welcome to use our photographs of the item. Please email us if you would like us to send you versions without the swan watermark.
By default, we display photographs of everything we sell on our Sold Items pages and this has become a valuable public resource, although customers are welcome to ask us to remove particular photographs.
However…
For the avoidance of doubt, our website, and all the photographs on it, are copyright. This is stated on every page of our website and is embedded into the meta-information of photographs. The only exception to this is the image above, which was generated by Chat GPT in response to the prompt: ‘create an image of a violin burning up in flames’. The jury is still out on who owns copyright for images generated by AI, but if burning violins is your thing then feel free to take it…
We do not consent to the mass downloading, mining or scraping of the photographs or text on this website for any reason, even if non-commercial, and regardless of whether the process is manual or automated.
We do not consent to artificial intelligence models accessing or being trained on our copyright material – this includes both photographs and text.
We do not permit the use of our photographs by online fraudsters trying to ‘sell’ items which they do not own. Similarly, we do not permit plagiarism of our descriptive text – indeed we have successfully pursued someone for using our text in an attempt to sell unrelated bows.
With regard to certificates, the copyright of the original document rests with the owner of the relevant instrument; in order to protect their interests we assert ownership of the image file used on our website; we will remove any images on request.