Features
Editorial: Virgin Mobile gets burned with Creative Commons photo from Flickr
It was bound to happen. The moment we old-timers in the stock photo industry have all been waiting for has finally arrived. A high profile client got burned by using down-market images that, it turns out, had no model releases. I and, I suspect, many colleagues got more than a little satisfaction out of the news.
Last week, we learned that Virgin Mobile Australia used not-model-released images its ad-agency obtained from Flickr in a nation-wide print campaign in that country. The agency, called Host, assumed they could safely use the images because Flickr displayed them under a Creative Commons license. Host failed to recognize, however, that such a license has no bearing on the people depicted in the images. To make matters worse, the copy in the ads, shows those people in a less-than-flattering light, accusing them of having bad breath for example. Not surprisingly, the models’ lawyers are eagerly and noisily revving their engines.
I’d like to think this Virgin Mobile affair will have a positive effect on the “traditional” stock photo industry by making clients think twice before they go for the bargain-priced images, but I’m afraid that’s wishful thinking. While many have speculated about Flickr formally entering the stock photo business and how that might affect the industry, the company has yet to do so, and perhaps now we see why. In the meantime, as far as I know, the micro-stock companies already selling millions of images per year have yet to become involved in an embarrassing case like this one. The Virgin/Flickr incident may become a major head-ache for Virgin (and a wind-fall for the models and their lawyers,) but it will barely register with the micro-stock crowd.
Click here for more details from Agency Spy.
Comments(1)
post a comment »john griffin, July 24, 2007 [#]
Seems like a big gamble for a player like Virgin to be taking. I don’t understand how they could be so niave to think that an ad that displays the models in an unflattering light, wouldn’t rufffle those peoples feathers and they would at least want to make sure it was properly released. What is the most likely outcome? Will Host get in trouble?