rediff.com uses my photograph without permission
Update to the story. The story has come to a good end. Thank you for all the support and help with retweets, blog posts, comments and facebook wall posts on the incident. It really helped a lot to get the message across even before rediff editorial received the feedback I left on their site.
I received a call from rediff just now. They apologized for the incident and agreed to include correct attribution and also provide compensation for using the image. I thank rediff for the quick turnaround and proactive handling of the problem in a rightful way.
Thanks to everyone again for taking up the issue with a personal interest, providing helpful suggestions and spreading the word.
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Original Story
I was browsing through Rediff News this morning and was going through a story on Cherrapunjee. In their multi-page slideshow, I clicked on the second page and jumped when the page loaded. A picture of a waterfall I had taken at Cherrapunjee was smiling at me from the web page! Rediff had not only posted the image without my permission, they had also attributed the photograph to a “Sunil Bhatia!”
The page in which they are using picture is here (click ‘next’ on the slideshow to see my image of Nohkalikai Waterfall). You can see a screenshot of the page below (click to see full size).
The image of Nohkalikai Falls could have been taken from here (link to Cherrapunjee story on my blog) or here (link to image of Nohkalikai Falls in my image gallery).
I have written to rediff using the feedback form on their webpage, asking for attribution and compensation. I am waiting to hear from them and am eager to see how they will respond, if at all.
Rediff has been my primary source of news online so far. I have a high opinion about them and especially have a lot of respect for columns at rediff. I hope they respond in a way that helps me keep up that respect.
I also tried to leave a comment on the same page, but it repeatedly gave me error messages.
I shall update here, if there is any response from rediff.