This morning my wife was shopping at Carrefour and she was looking at some of the Halloween costumes on sale for our kids. She noticed a picture of a girl that looks a lot like Elaine, so she took better look. Then she got a shock because she realized it was a picture of Elaine!

Turns out that a Chinese company had used an older picture of Elaine, badly photoshopped it with their halloween custome and put it on the packaging material of their products. Of course we never gave permission for this. The products are sold in many stores in China, among others Carrefour and Walmart. Not sure yet what we will do, will discuss with my wife when I am back in China tomorrow.

By the way, it’s not only Chinese companies that do this, something similar happened once with Nokia: one of my Flickr pictures ended up in a campaign for the Nokia E65!

Update (Oct. 11, 2011): Grace contacted the company, after some discussions they told us that they used Elaine’s picture for 2 products and agreed to change all the packaging with her picture on it. Let’s see if they will really do it. Hopefully no need for a court case.