Here is an interesting case where Creative Commons can get you in trouble. For those who don’t know, Creative Commons in an organization that provides alternate licensing schemes for copyrighted material. By licensing your work under Creative Commons, you make it easier for people to use your work within certain bounds.

In this case, this “fair use” has translated into a libel suit for Virgin Mobile filed by the family of 16 year old Alison Chang.

The Case Of Alison Chang

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Virgin Mobile Australia (Virgin Mobile U.S. claims not to have been involved) has been running a campaign that they call “Are You With Us Or What?” It involves taking pictures from Flickr and superimposing advertising slogans on top of them. Two of these captions that appeared over Alison’s photo were, “Dump your pen friend.” and “Free text virgin to virgin.” These ads appeared both on the companies website and on Billboards.

Needless to say, Miss Chang’s family was not particularly pleased with what they say amounts to libel. They also claim that the photographer, Justin Ho-Wee Wong was not properly credited by Virgin Mobile, putting them in direct violation of the terms of the license.

Web 2.0 Roundup

This raises an important question. How well do authors who license their work through services like Creative Commons understand what rights they are giving away? In this case, Virgin Mobile Australia may have failed to properly attribute Mr. Wong for the photograph, but had they followed the terms of the license the Chang family would have been left with a far more difficult to defend case.

Especially for amateur photographers who have never really shared their work beyond the scope of their circle of friends, it is important to note that the web is an entirely different landscape. For the first time, advertisers have at their disposal a wealth of high quality, royalty free imagery. As more firms discover this, it is not outrageous to believe that some will choose to take advantage of this fact.

One thing that you can do to protect yourself while still retaining a certain amount of freedom is to set your license to Non-Derivative, Non-Commercial. For most big corporations, this should be more than enough to make it impossible for them to use your image in any way that you would not approve of.

However, the reality of the situation is that there is no really fail-safe way to secure work that you have chosen to make publicly available. The question is, do you think the idea of a clever advertiser using your work in a campaign (with or without proper attribution) would dissuade you from posting your next photo set?

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