Comment Re:Where's the model release? (Score 1) 524
Unless he specifically stated that the image is suitable for commercial usage, the counselor should not lose the case here - it's Virgin and/or whatever advertising agency put together the advertisement. Creative Commons license or no. The license only covers the image, not the person in the image.
I work as a production graphic artist. We have very strict policies about image usage. If you don't know for sure that we have permission to use an image, you don't use it. Period. If we have permission to use the photo, but there is someone identifiable in it aside from the photographer or the employees of the business we're building the ad for, we either do not use the image or we use Photoshop to take them out of it. We subscribe to three different stock photo services for this reason, and all photos they have are model-released. (We actually had a woman threaten us with a lawsuit once a couple of years ago, saying we'd used her daughter's photo, but we had a model-release for it.)
For these reasons we also do not use sites suck as StockXchange or Morguefile. While they grant a license on the site to use the photos in any way, including commercially, there's no guarantee that it would hold up in court. The money we pay to the stock photo services ensures that we will not have to even get as far as a courtroom.
Simply put, picking up a photo off the internet is a very dumb move in advertising. Sooner or later, it will get you sued.
I work as a production graphic artist. We have very strict policies about image usage. If you don't know for sure that we have permission to use an image, you don't use it. Period. If we have permission to use the photo, but there is someone identifiable in it aside from the photographer or the employees of the business we're building the ad for, we either do not use the image or we use Photoshop to take them out of it. We subscribe to three different stock photo services for this reason, and all photos they have are model-released. (We actually had a woman threaten us with a lawsuit once a couple of years ago, saying we'd used her daughter's photo, but we had a model-release for it.)
For these reasons we also do not use sites suck as StockXchange or Morguefile. While they grant a license on the site to use the photos in any way, including commercially, there's no guarantee that it would hold up in court. The money we pay to the stock photo services ensures that we will not have to even get as far as a courtroom.
Simply put, picking up a photo off the internet is a very dumb move in advertising. Sooner or later, it will get you sued.
