Choose your licence carefully

[charleski]

Those who use flickr may already be aware of this law suit against an Australian ad company.

Now, obviously the ad firm is in the wrong here, any professional creative agency should know the importance of getting all the necessary clearances before using material from elsewhere, and anyone who thinks flickr is a free stock photo agency is bound to end up in trouble sooner or later. But Justin Wong, the photographer, is at least partly to blame for the situation by choosing a CC licence that allows commercial use, even though his photographs were not properly cleared.

It's easy to see why he made that choice. Any aspiring photographer nurtures the hope that his work will be discovered and wants to get his name out there. But it worries me that it might be thought that using this licence is implicitly stating that the subjects who were photographed have signed the relevant releases, which will just not be true for the vast majority of amateur photographers. In this case the subject is a friend of the photographer, so she won't be suing him, but it seems clear to me that he made a bit of a screw-up here.

In a testament to pathetic litigiousness, both Wong and the subject are suing Creative Commons for not providing legal advice about the commercial use of photographs .

[usxhe190]

I agree Justin Wong must feel a bit stupid to get his own friend in this royal mess..

i think the weird thing about this is is there are people in the comments/forums attacking the girl because they feel she should be GRATEFUL that Virign Mobile picked her to be on ads...

And I totally agree with these people. I mean she should be grateful - just like how grateful these people would be to me when I take a photo of their grandmother for the next viagra ad...