© Maenads Gems means Copyright Maenads’ Gems.

This means that all text and images have been produced by M. Walden-Till specifically for the web site venture published under the domain name maenads-gems.co.uk, or sub domains of this domain.

The copyright resides with M. Walden-Till and no parts of these web sites may be reproduced in any form either written or electronic without permission in writing from me. If necessary I will strenuously defend this copyright because these sites represent a large investment of time and energy.

Copyright law is complicated but the rules are very simple.
If someone produces a new and original work then that work is automatically protected against duplication, or copying, by another person.

It is not possible to copyright single words or short phrases and this fact can often lead people into inadvertently infringing copyright.
They become confused and think that, for example, as you can not copyright the phrase ‘Coro brooch’ or ‘it is silver in colour’ or ‘price $67’ that the combination of these phrases into ‘ Coro brooch, price $67. It is silver in colour’ is not covered by copyright.
This is not the case.
The particular style of combining the phrases produces an original literary product, especially when it is only a small part of a much larger page which is an original literary product. When you take a whole page of text you can be fairly certain it is constructed in an original way and therefore copyright will cover it.

Pictures are always covered by copyright. If you take a photograph then the copyright of that image is owned by you; unless you are taking a picture of a copyrighted image where the copyright of the original image does not belong to you, in this case you can not then use it in any physical or electronic form without permission.
An example of this would be if someone created a painting and I took a photograph of it; I would not be able to display that photograph without permission. Similarly if someone took a photograph and displayed it on the internet I could not copy that and display it on my web site without permission, not even if I cropped it a different way and changed the contrast.

So as you can see copyright provides a great deal of protection for the work people put into new productions, I have read that it is very difficult and extremely expensive for someone to successfully defend a case where they have breached another person’s copyright.
In website copyright infringement, the hosting company and the website designer for the website with stolen images or literature would also be considered to be in breach of the law. So it is likely that a complaint to that company or designer would result in the whole website being removed from the server.

For more detailed information about copyright issues I suggest you read both the US and the UK Copyright sites, these will not only inform you about the particulars of copyright in these two countries but will give you a good idea about internationally accepted copyright legislation.