Well, we knew we were right. The Iconic Britain competition - an attempt by Microsoft to get someone, anyone, to use their live.com search engine - has officially backfired on the company and the competition's main sponsors, Nikon.

As I detailed in previous posts (see 'Microsoft & Nikon encourage copyright theft' and 'The Iconic Britain backlash'), the competition trampled all over photographers' intellectual property rights.

The initial phase of the competition, which involved site visitors voting on images found using live.com, has now shut. For the next stage, Microsoft will present 500 images on which people can vote - but the company will seek permission and purchase the necessary licences.

In the meantime, both Microsoft and Nikon have responded with due humility to the outrage they caused among photographers who felt - correctly - that their work was being exploited for the benefit of those companies.

Leading the charge was the Pro-Imaging group, and it has now received official responses from Microsoft and Nikon. Microsoft said:

We are grateful to Pro-Imaging for raising its concerns about the use of photographers' works on the Iconic Britain website. Although this was only a short marketing programme, it’s always very important to Microsoft that we respect the intellectual property rights of others. We apologise that we have not lived up to our ordinarily high standards. 

We have since taken steps to obtain the rights to use every image to be featured in the subsequent stages of the Iconic Britain competition. We also welcome the invitation by Pro-Imaging to discuss with them best practices when using photographs in similar competitions.

And Nikon's message:

Nikon would like to confirm that it has withdrawn its support from Microsoft’s Iconic Britain competition. This is due to the feedback and concerns raised by photographers and entrants surrounding the competition mechanic that was developed and promoted by Microsoft.

Nikon will fulfil its prize commitment to the winners, however it will not be associated with the competition going forward.

Clearly, these companies (or, more likely, their lawyers) understood just how vulnerable they had made themselves. Microsoft, in particular, isn't in the habit of making apologies so, at the very least, they must have understood just how bad this made them look. Nikon's statement is stronger and is to be applauded, I feel - though it's carefully worded to push all the responsibility Microsoft's way.

This is an important victory.

While many togs have talked about charging for use of images in the competition (though some of us were being ironic, given the impossibility of any such claim), there is no sensible or logical way of working out fair compensation for such use, especially as one can have no definite proof that one's images were ever displayed (though Microsoft's logs might reveal that). The important thing, then, is to prevent the use of images in this way.

The very vocal response from photographers, and the backing-down by Microsoft and Nikon, have helped set a precedent that this kind of abuse of people's intellectual property is simply not on.