Creative Commons and Flickr sued in Texas
The argument against Creative Commons is apparently that the poster of the picture of the teenage girl was not adequately informed that he could be impinging on the rights of others based on the information provided by creative commons.
Larry and Joi both comment on the suit but neither can comment on its merits given their respective positions. What they both bring up is the question as to whether Creative Commons should address questions of privacy. This comes up in this current case because the poster to Flickr posted allowing commercial usage, much like I do (and I had my first commercial use last week).
I don’t think that CC needs to head down that road. What they do need to say is that their work only applies in the realm of property and copyrightable materials. I think any judge worth their salt will see that immediately. Rights of the subject of photography are not really dealt with under this license and other laws cover those rights.
So my argument is that the CC license only covers some of the rights involved in photography, that it is clear about that, and any other rights or responsibilities of the photographer and his or her subject are not implied under the license. I suspect this suit will be dismissed on that basis, but we’ll see. I expect that the suit against flickr will go a bit farther.
here is a picture of the commercial use of the image, note the ‘virgin’ trademark plays a significant part as almost a double entendre. Thanks to Jonl for this link.
