Virgin Mobile Australia is being sued by a family in Texas that claims the corporation used a photo of their teenage daughter Alison on billboards and website advertisements without consent. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on this today, but it was reported in Australian IT months ago.

It turns out the photo was taken by Alison’s youth counsellor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who shares his photos on Flickr under a Creative Commons Atribution license.  It quickly becomes obvious how little people actually understand about Creative Commons.

Virgin included the Flickr URL in the ad, which is one of the best forms of attribution as it also implicitly points to the CC licensing information.  They have remixed (adapted the work), which is explicitly allowed under the CC Attribution license, and attributed the work as required.  They have played fair by the rules that the photographer himself chose.

But what about Alison?  I’ve had a search, and can’t find any information about the subject of a photograph having claim to the copyright.  I do remember from somewhere that if a photo is taken inside a private building then the subject (or is it the building owner?) owns the copyright, but I can’t find anything that says this.  Its a bit absurd, anyway, because obviously all the compromising magazine photos of celebrities were taken and published without their consent.

Alison and her family could have asked Justin to remove the photo from his Flickr profile if they did not wish for her image to be publicly displayed.  It seems, however, that they are only upset with Virgin’s use of the image.  Essentially, they are assuming that a person can have complete control over the use of any image of themselves – and this would be a scary precedent, as nobody would be able to take photos of other people without first having them sign consent.

While it seems that Virgin Mobile Australia understands Creative Commons licenses, it is obvious that there are many who don’t.  This blog post, for instance, shows not only an ignorance of permissive licenses but is quite derogatory about them.

 When alerted many of the victims described the unpaid use of their work as – inevitably – ‘cool’.

They can’t be victims when they have gone out of their way to make their photographs available under specific and carefully-crafted CC licenses.  Of course it is ‘cool’ that Virgin chose their images, its a tremendous compliment.

I’ll be interested to see how it all pans out.