What will you do when you find yourself in an advertisement or commercial all over the places without knowing before?
It happens in Virgin Mobile’s new Australian advertisement. It uses lots of pictures from Flickr with its own message on them. Because of CCBY 2.0 License, Virgin Mobile has no obligation to notify the pictures’ creators or owners. All Virgin Mobile needs to do is to displace the Flickr correspondent web-address at the lower left hand corner of each advertisement. Under the license, these can be used for commercials or redesigns. In this series of advertisement, one is being flipped over and has the Adidas logo on the cap being erased. However, the main problem is the person in the pictures.
These people do not have any obligation to be your models free of charge; plus being phrased like “Dump Your Pen Friend” or other irritating ones. Besides copyright, there is also confidentiality. Here, we are talking about a Model Release. As a publisher of the advertisement, Virgin Mobile needs the consents of these people in the form of a Model Release.
One of them has hired an attorney to deal with Virgin Mobile. There is no further information yet. This give me some thoughts. We need to carefully choose the right Creative Commons Deed. In my case, I have picked “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5”. No bother.
Read more: Virgin Mobile advertising campaign using Flickr photos
Flickr Photos
