Family Sues Virgin mobile over use of Creative Commons licensed picture
When using the popular photo site, Flickr, do you understand what exactly the Creative Commons license entails?
In April of this year, Alison Chang, a 16-year old from Texas, was photographed by her youth counselor flashing a peace sign. He later posted the image to his Flickr account and labeled it with the Creative Commons Attribution license. Under this particular CC license, it says that the image may be used so long as credit is given to the source.
Sometime in June, Virgin Mobile’s Australian launched an ad campaign using photos from Flickr with various slogans; the picture of Alison was one of the ones chosen. The image was cropped just to show her and flipped to face the other direction. The slogan claimed “DROP YOUR PEN FREIND” at the top and at the bottom it said “FREE TEXT VIRGIN TO VIRGIN”. The ads did include a notice for the source of the image.
Through Internet searches, and another upload to Flickr, Alison learned of the picture’s use and the family has decided to sue both Virgin and the Creative Commons licensing group. The lawsuit was filed on September 20th in Texas, but, oddly, it lists Virgin Mobile USA, not Australia, in the lawsuit. As the two branches are not associated, Virgin USA is being asked to be removed from the suit. It is also unclear why the Creative Commons group is named.
The family states that the advertisement has caused their daughter ridicule and they feel the image was used wrongly.
This issue raises many questions about the legality of rights on the Internet. Does the Creative Commons license actually mean anything? Is the photographer at all responsible since he put up the image? As of this writing, he still had not changed the licensing on the image.
On the surface, this seems to be a very simple case, but if it should get its day in court, it could have ramifications on how images are distributed on the net.
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September 22nd, 2007
yeah, if the family sees the picture of the girl again here then you may be included in the lawsuit??
September 24th, 2007
ee:
No. Use for journalistic purposes falls under “Fair Use”.
September 27th, 2007
” It is also unclear why the Creative Commons group is named.”
Isn’t that obvious?
If they hadn’t used the unnecessary fancy license, and stuck to All Rights Reserved, the lawsuit would never have taken place.
And if all the photographs Virgin used were All Rights Reserved – > 100 people would have been paid!
CC is confusing and useless – get rid.
October 31st, 2007
I enjoy Flickr but I’ll never use it for my private photos, I’d rather use 2pad .
I don’t want anybody to be able to see my family photos. I want to decide exactly who will get them and I want to personalize the comments according to each recipient. In this case she will not have problem with Virgin. Flickr is public 2Pad is Private
Then I use http://www.2pad.com.
October 31st, 2007
I enjoy ahoto sharing web site but I’ll never use it for my private photos, I’d rather use 2pad .
I don’t want anybody to be able to see my photos. I want to decide exactly who will get them and I want to personalize the comments according to each recipient. In this case she will not have problem with Virgin. Flickr is public 2Pad is Private
February 24th, 2008
CC is confusing? Maybe if you’re retarded.
June 8th, 2010
” It is also unclear why the Creative Commons group is named.”
“Isn’t that obvious?
If they hadn’t used the unnecessary fancy license, and stuck to All Rights Reserved, the lawsuit would never have taken place.”
By “they”, you can’t mean Creative Commons. *They* didn’t *Use* any license at all.
You can’t mean Virgin. *They* are being sued as a user, not a publisher. Whatever copyright terms *they* attached to their derivative work has nothing to do with this matter.
So, you must mean Alice Chang’s youth counselor. *They* used the CC license. I agree, Alice Chang’s youth counselor chose a license which, for his and Alice’s purposes, was “unnecessarily fancy”. But, nobody’s suing *him*, so, what are you talking about, saying the lawsuit wouldn’t have taken place? He’s the one who published Alice Chang’s picture in the first place.
Digger, you said it, man.
June 8th, 2010
phillipe, the important part is not that “Flickr is public and 2Pad is private”.
The important part is that 2Pad’s terms of service say nothing at all about the copyrights of the content they store on your behalf. 2Pad doesn’t encourage you, or even provide any way for you, to relinquish any of your rights as part of using their service. In fact, their terms of service provide you with instructions about how to get their help if you find that someone is mis-using your content which 2Pad hosted or you. Flickr, on the other hand, encourages copyright holders and content publishers to choose a “some rights reserved” license.
Flickr even (I think) makes you opt out of a CC license – their default is that your work will be indicated as some flavor of CC rights grant, unless you specify otherwise.
So, it’s not at all as simple as “you can’t google my 2Pad pictures”. Even if I could find all your 2Pad pictures, or even if you posted them on a completely un-secured website, you retain all rights until you make a choice to grant some to me. Flickr just has an extremely loose sense of what indicates “choice” on a publisher’s part. Nobody reads their Terms Of Service until it’s too late, and many Flickr users are completely ignorant of the fact that Flickr has “helped” them to grant certain otherwise-reserved rights to anyone who finds their works on Flickr.