The High Cost Of Free Stuff

Posted on September 27, 2007 
Filed Under Uncategorized

My friend and graphic designer colleague Jennifer Duarte passed this along to me today. Amazing. A high profile example of how free Internet stuff, used for commercial purposes, can easily blow up in your face.. and how open source ideals can lead directly to real world problems.

The story on MSNBC:

A Dallas family has sued Australia’s Virgin Mobile phone company, claiming it caused their teenage daughter grief and humiliation by plastering her photo on billboards and Web site advertisements without consent.

The family of Alison Chang says Virgin Mobile grabbed the picture from Flickr, Yahoo Inc.’s popular photo-sharing Web site, and failed to credit by name the photographer who took the photo.

Chang’s photo was part of a Virgin Mobile Australia campaign called “Are You With Us Or What?” It features pictures downloaded from Flickr superimposed with the company’s ad slogans.

The story then goes on to explain that this girl, whose picture was taken at a church car wash in April by her youth counselor, was stunned to discover that her image was being used without her permission to sell a service called “virgin to virgin”. Virgin Mobile is responding by arguing that the photo’s licensing under a commercial-use-permitted Creative Commons license meant that using her image was perfectly wonderful.

Here’s the image:

What on earth was Virgin Mobile thinking?

This kind of thing actually happens a lot more than people realize, or at least would if creative professionals didn’t fight regularly to keep it from happening. Personally, I can’t even begin to count the number of times that I’ve had to explain concepts like plagiarism, defamation, copyright and model releases to clients who only care that free stuff costs a whole lot less than professional-quality work.

Forget the moral angle for a second. Even forget about the lawsuit. Just stop and think about the potential public relations fallout here. The next time you think about using that Internet photo on your website or brochure, stop - do you have any idea at all who that person is? Whether they’ve signed a model release? Or would you like to wait until a multi-million-dollar campaign has hit the street before discovering that your “free” model is actually a churchgoing waif whose family is now mortified that her face has been stolen by your company?

Years ago, I was a serious open source advocate - never anticopyright, but excited and advocative about licenses like CC and GPL. And I’d still like to believe. But every day that passes, and every story like this, chews a bit of my idealism away and makes me wonder if they only end up letting big companies rip people off.

I’ll probably comment more as I mull further. Right now I’m just flabbergasted it even happened. Whoever made this particular decision should be fired and blacklisted from taking any creative job ever again.

I know. More idealism showing. But leave a guy with his dreams, okay?

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