Creative Commons Gets Sued
· Sep 20, 01:46 PM
If you haven’t heard, there’s a bit of a debacle over some advertisements Virgin Mobile put up in Australia.
Basically, Virgin took some photos with Creative Commons licenses and captioned them for use in their ads. Perfectly legal. However, they failed to get “model releases” from the individuals in the photograph.
See, if you’re going to publish a photo for profit, even if you have the license for it, you still need releases from people that may be IN the photo. The only exception is when they’re unrecognizable.
One teenage girl’s picture was used. It was captioned, “Dump your pen friend girl,” whatever that means.
Now her and her family are suing. According to the Associated Press, Virgin’s use of the photo caused the girl “grief and humiliation.”
The experience damaged Alison’s reputation and exposed her to ridicule from her peers and scrutiny from people who can now Google her, the family charged in the lawsuit.
The strange thing is, when I Google her, I come up with nothing. Could not find the ad in question.
Here’s another strange thing:
Chang’s family filed a lawsuit late Wednesday in state district court in Dallas against Virgin Mobile USA LLC, its Australian counterpart, and Creative Commons Corp., a Massachusetts nonprofit that licenses sharing of Flickr photos.
Now, I haven’t read the lawsuit (haven’t found it yet) but it seems to me that Creative Commons would be innocent in all this.
Creative Commons license is only to license the distribution of the photograph, and has nothing to do with model releases. Virgin should have known that.
Here’s my message to the Chang family:
Sue Virgin, Leave CC alone. KTHNXBYE