Photo theft by The Sunday Times

I was shocked and extremely disappointed to find one of my flickr photos on the online edition of the Sunday Times this morning (Sunday 18 May 2008). The photo on flickr is marked as 'All rights reserved' and unlike some naive user, a publishing house such as Wijeya Newspapers should have some understanding and respect for intellectual property. Under these circumstances where I was never contacted, I never gave consent nor have they credited me and they have even done a crappy job at post processing, this amounts to robbery of intellectual property. I am curious to find out if this appears in the print edition as well since they boast that they are 'Sri Lanka's largest selling independent English language Sunday newspaper'.

The offending article titled "Beneath the lanterns: A closer look at the true meaning of Vesak by Madhushala Senaratne and Himal Kotelawala" is here:

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My original photos is:


They even use a cropped version on the main homepage as shown here:

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as well as the 'Mirror' page as shown here:

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It is extremely sad that people do this so blatantly and with impunity. My photo is the first hit on flickr when searching for 'Vesak' and maybe they regularly source (steal) photos off flickr to fill in their pages. I am further saddened by the fact that The Sunday Times and Dailymirror are regularly read by me and I had a certain degree of respect towards these publications but now thats all lost.

The original photo was taken by me at the 'Sri Lanka Buddhist Vihara in Canberra (Australia)' on Vesak day 2007. These lanterns were the smaller 'pataw kudu' of a larger rotating lantern we built in 2005. Its ironic that this article is about the merits of vesak and they use a stolen photo to illustrate it. Extremely disappointed indeed.

Anybody out there who is familiar with intellectual property laws in Sri Lanka?

Edit1: Found out that this photo covers a third of a page (page 7) in the print edition of the 'Mirror magazine' supplement of the Sunday Times of Sunday 18 May 2008.

Print edition:


Edit2:I just found out (Wednesday 21 May) that they are using the same image for the banner of the 'order online' page selling all print publications produced by Wijeya Newspapers.


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Through this site, they sell print editions all over the world. They also have a rate card with pricing. For example, a 1 year print edition subscription for The Sunday Times to a US address is US$249.

What earlier started out as a case of an editor browsing the net looking to find a photo to illustrate an article have turned out to be a full scale corporate theft where they blatantly use my photo without consent and payment for a clearly commercial purpose.

Edit3:As of Friday 23 May, the photo had been removed from the main article page on the online edition. The banner on the 'order online' page and the smaller versions on the main homepage of the Sunday Times and the Mirror magazine online editions remain.

Edit4:As of Sunday 25 May, the smaller sized photos from the main page and the mirror page of the online edition has been removed. The banner on the 'order online' page of Wijeya Newspapers still remains.

Edit5:As of Tuesday 27 May, the banner on the 'order online' page of Wijeya Newspapers has been replaced by a different image.