Dumbshit Dept.
Dumbshits sue the Creative Commons
The most interesting story of the day talks about the creative commons being sued. The founders of the CC were quite worried that this would happen and they crafted the non-profit to limit its exposure (and imposed a ceiling to what effect it could have on the world, but that is another blog post). But I don't think this case was one that they had envisioned -- proof once again that you can't make anything idiot proof.
A youth counsellor snapped a picture of one of his students and then posts it to Flickr with an attribution license. Commercial use was allowed! Virgin Mobile Australia finds the picture, uses it and gives attribution to the photographer -- nothing wrong was done here. Then the student finds out that she is part of the Virgin Ad campaign, gets pissy and sues Virgin Mobile in the US and the Creative Commons.
The family says that:
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 said in the lawsuit.
"It's the tag line; it's derogatory," said Damon Chang, 27. "A lot of her church friends saw it."
Oh please! This lawsuit boggles the mind -- I can't believe that they found a lawyer willing to file it. The Creative Commons didn't do anything wrong -- they provided the license, but had no hand in actually licensing the picture. Virgin Mobile USA wasn't involved either, yet they and the CC are the plaintiffs of the lawsuit.
It makes sense to sue one person in this case: The youth counsellor. But I'm guessing that this guy doesn't have deep pockets, so why sue him? Let's sue everyone tangential to the actual case, in hopes that someone is going to fork over cash to make this lawsuit go away.
I hate stupid people and I hate stupid lawyers that write suits like these. I hope that Larry argues these fools into the ground -- I'd pay to see that!
Posted by Mayhem at September 22, 2007 11:43 AM
Very scandalous picture there!
Yeah, suing CC and Virgin in the US is ridiculous. But I'm not sure Virgin Australia didn't do anything wrong. I can't see any license info on http://flickr.com/photos/chewywong/467623403/ apart from "© all rights reserved" (do I need to be registered?) but on other places it says they used a non-commercial license. And http://www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157600541608353/#comment72157600542126986 suggests that according to Australian laws she they should have asked her.
Even with CC, in cases like this I would always go the save way and ask everyone involved (people depicted) for their permission. I do that before publishing pictures of my friends, I would do with other people as long as it's not a public event. In this case it wasn't a picture of her being drunk or something but finding yourself on ads all over the country and on the internet forever, especially for a young person, that's not what I would want...
