What it seems to have happened is that Virgin Mobile, or an advertising agency they hired, decided to save lotsa moola and attempt some good PR (backfiring, obviously) by using Flickr photos with Creative Commons licenses (specifically, the ones that allowed commercial use) in a recent ad campaign. Which, fine, is legal, though, perhaps, cheap-assed. What’s getting people especially crazy over this (and this doesn’t include me, thankfully) is that they’re using these photos without the models’ permissions

It seems some random person has spotted Gillians Flickr photo of a smashed car used on an advertisement. No problem there, it was CC licensed in a way that meant only attribution was necessary. Notification to these Flickr users would have been the polite thing, but ok it’s not a requirement.

The crazy thing though is there are people in these advertisements. Without model releases. Being insulted.

There is more coverage here and over at Flickr.

Tags: flickr, virgin, copyright, cc, license, pr, disaster

Tweet