I am not so happy to post this but being such an important issue I feel that I have to. Raising awareness and educating people to the copyrights and moral rights of photographers has always been something I put extra attention to.

Every photographer loves a good feedback for his work and I am not an exception. I always love reading nice comments on the blog or by email and have a special pleasure seeing the work published. Never the less, sometimes I am not so happy when I find my work is being used for commercial purposes without obtaining permission.

I am working on the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of my website these days and ran a google search on wedding websites in India only to find a website, rather large one, that have liked my wedding images a little too much. The web designer or the business owners have decided that they could actually use some of my pictures to promote their own website and created a banner with three images taken from the web gallery on www.sephi.com/weddings

Not only that they did not ask for permission for that and didn’t mention my name as the photographer, but they also claim that the images belong to them and cannot be used without permission!!

Needless to say that I have written to them at once and I am happy to say that it seems they are taking action to remove the banner immediately.

here is a screen shot of the banner.

I always get a feeling of a ‘party pooper’ when I have to deal with copyright issues but as they say in ancient China; “a manzgadado what a manzgadado” :-)
what do you think? please leave a comment.

* Latest update as of this morning (21.01.2009), the banner has been removed and another, probably with some other photographer’s stolen images, has been placed instead.