I own an independent graphic design company and have been providing design work for local bands and businesses for a few years now; there are only a few of us in this company and we're not millionaires by any stretch of the imagination but we make enough to get by and the genuine love of our job gets us through it all. However, we've spent the last couple of months embroiled in some rather nasty commercial litigation after a larger company stole a piece of our work from the internet and used it in one of their campaigns.

We first noticed it on a social networking site on one of the banner adverts which fill that particular page; it looked familiar, but surely it couldn't be the same. After downloading and re-sizing it, it became obvious that this was the same design, albeit they'd changed the text which wouldn't be a lot of work for a vaguely competent graphic designer.

This company has a lot more money behind them than we do, and none of us know the first thing about commercial litigation, but we weren't going to take this lying down - this company had clearly made a lot of money out of our work, and we weren't happy about it. While suing them wasn't the first thought that came to mind - as I say, commercial litigation isn't our strong point - we felt that we should either see some of that money or at least get some credit for the design, hopefully generating some more business for our company.

We looked into the rest of the campaign they were using to see how much they'd used our work; if it was just the social networking site banners it wouldn't have been as big a deal as it would have been if they'd used it in print media or in other venues. It turned out that the work was also being used in magazines, flyers and in viral videos, meaning a lot of people were seeing our work and someone else was taking credit for it.

We shut down the office for an afternoon and began to seriously discuss what we were going to do about this. Though we thought about contacting the company directly we didn't think we'd get very far, so we visited a local solicitor who referred us to a group he deals with sometimes that specialises in commercial litigation.

The solicitor went through everything with us and, once we provided evidence of our work predating theirs, he seemed confident that we had a good chance of winning our case. Though the time spent in court hasn't been the most pleasant thing we've ever done, we feel justified in defending our work and are hopeful that we'll be able to help stop bigger companies stealing from smaller ones in the future.