Hangzhou -- A publishing company filed suit on Monday against Zhou Zhenglong, a farmer, who the company claims misappropriated a digital photograph of a rare tiger in one of its posters. The company is also suing a provincial official who criticized the quality of its work.

The two are accused of slandering the company when they claimed it had violated what they said was Zhou's copyright of the image, according to a spokesman for Vista Printing and Wrapping Co. Ltd., which is based in Yiwu, a boom town in the rich eastern Zhejiang Province.

The case involves an out-of-print poster that the company claims it published almost six years ago. However, the poster apparently wasn't widely circulated in the area where the defendants live.

Vista said it published posters of a south China tiger in the wild in 2002. "We reached a deal with a Beijing photo company that authorized us to reprint and sell the pictures," said Vista general manager Luo Guanglin.

Years went by and last October, the forestry department in northwestern Shaanxi Province announced that the rare tiger, which had not been spotted in the wild for more than 30 years, had been sighted in Zhenping County. It provided Zhou's photo as evidence.

Zhou, 52, who was a hunter in Chengguan Township, Zhenping County, until hunting was banned, reportedly took more than 70 shots of the animal with a digital camera and also filmed it on October 3. At the time, experts reportedly confirmed that the images showed one of the elusive cats.

But Chinese Internet users and a botanist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences have questioned the image's veracity, and some have claimed that it might have been digitally altered.