This lawsuit is riding the Internet wave as we speak. Thousands of news articles are pushing this story so I’m not going to rewrite this for you. You can read about this article at Yahoo News and MSNBC

After you read the article links above, you should know why this lawsuit is going down. I want to play the devil’s advocate on this and share my opinions on both sides here.

I would be feeling the same way and file a lawsuit as well if I was in Alison Chang’s shoes. At age 16, female, going to church, and getting picked on because of this lawsuit then I’m all for getting her compensated. She’s from Dallas and her family is claiming that this is causing her grief and humiliation. Most teenagers try their best to avoid humiliating and embarrassing situations. We’ve all been there right? Why can’t Virgin Mobile, a huge phone company with large bank account just compensate her and move on ?

The photographer, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, also in the lawsuit claiming unspecified damages, is the person who publicly uploaded the photo to his flickr account. When you upload photos to flicker.com you are given creative commons license(CCL) choices on how you want your photo to be distributed. He selected “allow commercial use” with Alison’s photo that is talked about here. Based from that selection by Justin, the lawsuit can go in favor of Virgin Mobile since they used her photo with CCL’s approval. You can browse or search through photos under each type of license here:

Justin should have uploaded the photo and clicked on “non commercial use only” creative commons license option that is available on flickr. Did he not know what creative common license is about? And, was he a novice user like most and generally does not read the terms of service but just clicks “Accept Terms of Service.”

A similar lawsuit was brought against Creative Commons in 2005, when a Dutch tabloid published a flicker photo here and that ruling came out in favor of the victim but in the end the tabloid was pardoned.

Here is another flickr lawsuit that ended with a settlement:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shutterblog/458161279

You can look at the actual court document that was filed in Dallas here: http://lessig.org/blog/complaint.pdf

As bloggers like myself, I can add creative commons license to my blog in two ways to protect my content & images.

1. Go directly to http://creativecommons.org/license/ I can choose two options: allow commercial use of my work or allow modifications of my work long as other share alike/give me the credit for distribution.

2. If you are current Feedburner user then this will only take few seconds to add it to your footer page.

Now, if you’ll allow me to spin off on this flickr subject:

I ran into a flickr babes (NSFW) blog few months back. This blog has over 22,000 RSS subscribers and running strong for over 2 years. I want to know who is behind this and why is this site not being monetized. It appears to me that there are only text links in the “Cool Links” area but still - this popular site isn’t monetized? I’d like to know why they opted for not monetizing it this because there are many copycat blogs running similar to flickr babes like this one that is monetizing it with many adult/cam/dating affiliate programs. Blog here (NSFW):http://www.chicksnbreasts.com/

This site has over 5,000 RSS subscribers. Can you make money from showing flickr babes photos on your blog? Yes? Possible? and doing so go against creative commons license that you are making money off of someone else’s photos on flickr ?? I will let you decide.

Filed under: Top World News