Forum Moderators: not2easy
One moment, Alison Chang, a 15-year-old student from Dallas, is cheerfully goofing around at a local church-sponsored car wash, posing with a friend for a photo. Weeks later, that photo is posted online and catches the eye of an ad agency in Australia, and Alison appears on a billboard in Adelaide as part of a Virgin Mobile advertising campaign.Four months later, she and her family are in Federal District Court in Dallas suing for damages.
Flickr Photo Used Without Permission [nytimes.com]
Moral: Think about what photos you upload, and what permissions you grant.
What about photos without people? I needed a photo of a particular type of building and found one on Flickr that I plan on using a derivative of in an upcoming site design. Any potential problems with this?
What about photos without people?
It depends, I believe the basic rules are, you can't use someone's picture without their permission. Without people it depends if the photo is copyrighted by the original photographer, it will usually by a note on the image itself, but that's no guantee.
I had a mate who had all sorts of photo's on his (commercial) site, that he's knicked from here and there. Eventually the copyright owner of some of the images found them and it cost him £2,500.
I don't think this actually applies to the case here. I believe the photographer posted the image with a CC license, but without a model release [danheller.com] from Ms. Chang.
