On 07 May, Mail Online, the Daily Mail's website, published three images shot by Emily James of Just Do It. The images, published on TwitPic, were shot at the St-Vincent polling station in Dalston on election day, "where large numbers of people were unable to vote because the high turnout," says James, who raised the issue with BJP.

While her images were used, after authorisation and payment, by other networks and print titles, James claims the Daily Mail failed to contact her before publishing them. So, she says, "we wrote them an invoice. We took the standard rate per picture recommended by the National Union of Journalists, £130, and multiplied it by three for use without our knowledge, consent, or permission."

Upon receiving a £1170 invoice, Elliot Wagland, online picture editor for the Daily Mail, answered, according to James, that he couldn't pay "the amount you have requested, these images were taken from twitpic and therefore placed in the public domain." He added: "We are more that happy to pay for the images but we'll only be paying £40 per image."

James' case isn't isolated. Last week, photographer Clive Flint found out the Daily Mail had altered and used one of his photographs of Lena Pietsch, a member of the Liberal Democrat party and press spokeswoman for Nick Clegg. Flint had published his image on Flickr under a Creative Commons license that only allows non-commercial and non-derivatives uses.

Now, the Daily Mail has moved to reaffirm that it was not the newspaper's policy "to breach photographers' copyrights," and that, a spokesman says, it will be "happy to look into individual cases."

However, the Daily Mail spokesman declined to comment further when asked to explain why the photographers hadn't been contacted, in the first instance, for use of their images.