andydidyk.com

I just read a story published in the Sydney Morning Herald that I was pretty shocked didn’t make headline news on Brandweek or Adage. Evidently, someone at Virgin Mobile Australia ripped an American teenage girl’s candid photo off of a Flickr account and placed it on billboards and print ads all over Australia. Now, anyone with half a brain knows that’s an enormous violation of common decency and the law, because no model release was obtained. What I was surprised to learn is that had the image not had a human subject and the photographer was credited on the ad, it would have been perfectly legal. The Sydney Morning Herald explains (I made a few spelling corrections for them, otherwise this is verbatim):

“People who post photos on Flickr are asked how they want to license their attribution. The youth counselor [the photographer] chose a sharing license from Creative Commons that allows others to reuse work such as photos without violating copyright laws, if they credit the photographer and say where the photo was taken. His Flickr page appears at the bottom of the ad.”

This is stirs up the Jekel and Hyde within me. As a photographer, I would be hard pressed to just offer up my images for public and/or commercial use without being compensated, and I highly doubt that most people (especially young people) who check that box know what the heck they are really doing. But, as a marketer, I had no idea such a rich and completely free resource existed!

I feel pretty bad for people who are routinely taken advantage of by technology. Spyware, adware, copyrighting snafus, planned obsolescence, identity theft, involuntary data mining tactics, etc. In some ways, I don’ t think anyone should be surprised by it, as our lives have been rapidly, completely, and irrevocably changed by the dawning of the Information Age. We simply haven’t had enough experience with all of the emerging technologies to be able to properly legislate proper protections, nor have we had enough experience living in this new era to know how to properly cope and adjust to the new ways that people are trying to exploit the average Joe.

While I’m not normally an advocate of lawsuits and I admittedly don’t know the entire story, I do hope that Alison’s family wins this lawsuit big-time, because I can’t imagine such a stupid and irresponsible act on the behalf of Virgin going unpunished. Thus far, Virgin is doing a terrible job of handling the story, with the US division crying “it’s not our problem!” and the Australian division refusing to comment. This looks to be a story for the PR textbooks, to be sure.