Texas Family 'Sues Creative Commons'

An anonymous reader writes "A Texas family has sued Creative Commons after their teenaged daughter's photo was used in an ad campaign for Virgin Mobile Australia. The photo had been taken by the girl's youth counselor, who put it on Flickr, and chose a CC Attribution license, which allows for commercial use. Virgin did, in fact, attribute the photo to the photographer, fulfilling the terms of the license, but the family is still suing Virgin Mobile Australia and Creative Commons. 'The lawsuit, filed in Dallas late yesterday, names Virgin Mobile USA LLC, its Australian counterpart, and Creative Commons Corp, a Massachusetts nonprofit that licenses sharing of Flickr photos, as defendants. The family accused the companies of libel and invasion of Chang's privacy. The suit seeks unspecified damages for Chang and the photographer, Justin Ho-Wee Wong.'"

Comments

Re:Why the License

[porkThreeWays]

CC has a chance of 99.9999% of getting away scott free. Most likely the family is fuming mad and suing anyone and anything. I doubt they even understand what creative commons is and were unreasonable when their lawyer tried to explain to them. The CC suit will be dropped. Most likely Virgin will settle out of court.

Also, ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? Did Virgin actually expect to go onto flickr, use someone's image without specifically asking (whether legally entitled or not), and not expect to get sued? ESPECIALLY someone who may be a minor. I'm not even talking about consulting with lawyers or risk management before doing such, but common fucking sense. 99% of the population would sue if their picture was featured in such an ad. It has nothing to do with what is legal, but a) common fucking sense and realizing you'll probably lose your job for such a stunt and b) knowing there will be nothing positive for the company that comes out of this.

Again, the insulting thing about this isn't the legal portion, but that Virgin would be so fucking stupid to pull such a stunt.