[LINK] Oz: 'Virgin backs down on ads'

[Scott Howard]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 10:36:11PM +1000, Eleanor Lister wrote:
> to those who say it is wrong under Moral Rights to mutilate images in an
> insulting way
> - you are correct, the Moral Right called Integrity means that you
> cannot use somebody's work to derogate them

Virgin Mobile did not derogate the photographer at all in any case as
far as I'm aware.  They _did_, in many cases, derogate the target of the
photos.  This is not an issue of copyright/moral right/etc, this is an
issue of having a Model Release form from the person _in_ the photo (not
the photographer) that you may use their image.  This is what Virgin did
not obtain and why there is an issue here.

> also notice that there appear to be violations of the Moral Right called
> Attribution
> - you are required to nominated the source of the work, even if it is
> open source

Attributation isn't (just) a moral right, it's a requirement of the
Creative Commons license.  Virgin did attribute the work to the
photographer via a URL to their Flickr site, which at the time was listed
as a valid form of attributation on Flickr.com. Interestingly the Flickr
page seems to have been changed now so that it simply refers off to the
Creative Commons website.

If anyone is genuinely interested in this issue (rather than just using it
as a lead-in to complain about WorkChoices legislation) it has been
discussed at length on the forums on flickr.com.  I would suggest
starting there before we just re-hash what has been discussed at length
there - especially as a number of people there have sought official legal
advise.

  Scott.