How a Toronto Photographer Recovered NIS 265,000 From an Israeli Developer

Result: NIS 265,000 paid to a Canadian photographer by an Israeli developer and its agency, with an injunction and a signed undertaking · Timeline: 9 months from letter of demand to settlement payment · Challenge: Foreign creator enforcing copyright against an Israeli company · Authority: Tel Aviv Magistrates Court · Financial Impact: NIS 265,000 recovered against NIS 47,000 of costs

Background

She photographs buildings for a living, mostly Canadian architects, and licenses individual images for defined uses at CAD 900 to CAD 1,800 each. In late 2024 an Israeli residential developer's marketing agency found her portfolio site while assembling a mood board for a project in Ramat Gan. Instead of licensing anything, they downloaded eleven high-resolution files, stripped the metadata, cropped the credit line out of the corner of each frame, and used them as though the photographs were of the developer's own buildings.

She found out in January 2026 from an Israeli architect who recognised a Toronto stairwell in a Ramat Gan brochure. By then the images had run on the project website for fourteen months, in two print brochure runs totalling roughly 12,000 copies, on a hoarding at the site, and across paid Facebook and Instagram campaigns aimed at buyers. Her first reaction was that a Canadian photographer with no Israeli presence, no Israeli company and no Israeli lawyer had no realistic way to do anything about it.

The Challenge

The threshold question in any foreign creator's Israeli claim is whether the work is protected in Israel at all. Section 4(a) of the Copyright Law 5768-2007 makes copyright subsist in original literary, artistic, dramatic and musical works, provided the work satisfies one of the points of attachment to Israel in Section 8 or is protected by Order under Section 9. Her photographs satisfy neither limb of Section 8. They were not first published in Israel, and she was not an Israeli citizen or habitually resident in Israel when she made them. They reach Israeli protection entirely through Section 9, which allows the Minister to extend protection by Order to works entitled to protection under a copyright treaty Israel has joined. Canada and Israel are both parties to the relevant treaties, and the Order made under Section 9 is the whole basis of her standing. It is the first thing an Israeli defendant tests and the first thing a foreign claimant's pleading has to establish rather than assume.

The second problem was the size of the claim. Israeli copyright litigation is usually not worth running on proved loss, because a photographer's proved loss is the licence fee she would have charged, and eleven licence fees is not a case. What makes it viable is Section 56, which allows the court to award damages without proof of injury of up to NIS 100,000 for each infringement. The battle in every Israeli copyright case worth having is fought over the word "each", because Section 56(c) provides that infringements carried out as part of a set of activities count as a single infringement. The developer's position, predictably, was that one download session in one marketing project was one set of activities and therefore one infringement, capped at NIS 100,000 for all eleven images across all channels.

In Practice: Under Section 56(a) of the Copyright Law 5768-2007 the court may award up to NIS 100,000 per infringement without proof of injury, and Section 56(b) directs it to weigh the scope and duration of the infringement, its severity, the actual injury, the benefit the defendant derived, the character of the defendant's activity, the relationship between the parties and the defendant's good faith. Against that, Section 56(c) collapses infringements committed as part of one set of activities into a single infringement. In the Tel Aviv Magistrates Court the practical consequence is that a claimant pleads each work as a separate infringement and each distinct campaign as a separate set, and the court usually lands between the two positions. The court fee is 2.5% of the amount claimed, with a Magistrates Court floor near NIS 773, so an inflated pleading costs real money on filing.

What We Did

We pleaded eleven infringements of copyright and eleven infringements of the moral right, and we pleaded the channels as four separate sets of activities rather than one.

The copyright case ran on Section 11(1) and Section 11(5), the exclusive rights of reproduction and of making a work available to the public, breached by Section 47, which makes it an infringement to do any Section 11 act without the owner's consent. The moral right ran separately. Section 45(b) makes the moral right personal and non-transferable and keeps it with the author even where copyright has been assigned, and Section 46(1) gives the author the right to have her name identified with her work in the manner suitable in the circumstances. Cropping a credit line out of every frame is not incidental to the copyright breach. It is a distinct wrong with its own head of damages, and in this file it was the fact that moved the settlement number more than anything else, because it demonstrated the removal was deliberate.

The agency ran the defence these cases always attract. It said it had acquired the images from a stock library and had no way of knowing they were protected, which is the innocent infringer defence in Section 58, available only where the infringer did not know and could not have known that copyright subsisted in the work. It failed on two facts. The original files carried her name in the visible credit line and in the embedded metadata, and both had been removed, which is difficult to reconcile with an honest belief in a stock licence. And Section 64(1) presumes that a person whose name appears on a work in the usual manner is its author and the owner of the copyright, which put the burden on the agency rather than on her.

We also asked for two remedies beyond money. Section 53 entitles a claimant in a copyright action to injunctive relief unless the court finds reasons to refuse it, which is a materially stronger position than a discretionary injunction. And Section 57 allows the court to order the defendant to give a detailed report of the infringement, which is how we established the brochure print run and the paid-media spend without discovery fights.

In Practice: A foreign claimant suing in Israel should expect an application under Regulation 157 of the Civil Procedure Regulations 5779-2018 for security for the defendant's costs, and the sanction for failing to deposit it is deletion of the claim. The developer asked for NIS 180,000; the court ordered NIS 42,000, deposited within 30 days. Her evidence was given by affidavit sworn before a notary in Ontario and apostilled there, Canada having joined the Apostille Convention on 11 January 2024, then filed with a certified Hebrew translation on the notarial scale of NIS 251 for the first hundred words and about NIS 197 per further hundred. Cross-examination was listed for video link. She was never asked to travel.

The Outcome

The case settled eight weeks after the defence was filed and three weeks after the Section 57 accounting order produced the media spend. The developer and the agency paid NIS 265,000 jointly, signed an undertaking not to use any of her images again in any medium, took the photographs off the website and the paid campaigns within seven days, and pulped the remaining brochure stock. Where the images had already appeared in third-party property listings, the developer wrote to the portals asking for removal or for her credit to be added.

Her costs, including the Israeli court fee, the security deposit, translation and legal fees, came to about NIS 47,000, and the security was returned on settlement. Nine months elapsed between the letter of demand and the payment landing in Toronto. She did not travel to Israel, did not appear in a hearing room, and did not open an Israeli entity of any kind.

What decided the number was not the strength of the copyright claim, which was never seriously contested once Section 64(1) was in play. It was the combination of eleven works, four distinct campaigns, fourteen months of use, and a stripped credit line, which is exactly the list Section 56(b) tells the court to weigh, and which made the defendants' single-infringement reading of Section 56(c) look untenable in front of a judge.

Key Takeaways

What this case illustrates for non-residents in similar situations:

1. A foreign creator's work is protected in Israel through Section 9 of the Copyright Law 5768-2007 rather than through Section 8, because a work made and first published abroad by a foreign national has no point of attachment to Israel. Plead the treaty route expressly; do not assume the court will supply it.
2. Statutory damages under Section 56 are what make a small creator's Israeli claim viable, and the whole value of the case turns on how many infringements you can properly plead. Separate works and separate campaigns are separate infringements; one download session used four ways is where Section 56(c) will be argued against you.
3. Keep the credit line and the file metadata, and keep the originals. Section 64(1) turns a name on the work into a presumption of authorship and ownership, which shifts the burden onto the Israeli defendant and usually ends the innocent infringer defence in Section 58 before it starts.
4. Plead the moral right under Sections 45 and 46 as a separate head. Removal of attribution is a distinct wrong, it survives an assignment of copyright, and in practice it is the fact that persuades a defendant the conduct will look deliberate at trial.
5. Budget for security for costs. A non-resident claimant in an Israeli court should assume a Regulation 157 application, expect an order in the tens of thousands of shekels, and treat non-payment as fatal, because the sanction is deletion of the claim rather than a stay.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If an Israeli company is using your photographs, designs, text or software without a licence, the claim is worth running from abroad far more often than foreign creators assume, and the deciding factors are documentary rather than geographic. Our guide to protecting intellectual property in Israel as a foreign business sets out the registration and enforcement framework, and using Canadian documents in Israel explains the apostille and translation standard your evidence will have to meet.

Contact us for a confidential consultation about your Israeli legal matter.