Web Directions

So much to learn, so little time

• In: Uncategorized
• By:Maxine
• July 13, 2007
• Leave a response

OK, I’ll be the first to admit to hav­ing played fast and loose with the law at var­i­ous stages of my career. But, I’ve largely worked as an indi­vid­ual, or as part of a very small, under resourced organisation.

There is no excuse at all for play­ing fast and loose when you are the mar­ket­ing depart­ment of a major inter­na­tional telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pany, or the peo­ple who run their mar­ket­ing cam­paigns for them.

Things like this really should not hap­pen. The fact that they do shows a dis­turb­ing lack of knowl­edge on the part of every per­son who signed off on it. I sus­pect no lawyer looked at it at all, as check­ing that model releases had been obtained would be the most basic due dili­gence. However, any­one in the cre­ative indus­tries, par­tic­u­larly the com­mer­cial cre­ative indus­tries, should know about them as well.

I doubt any legal action will come of this, and that’s really not the point. However I would like to think that some­one who thought they were pretty clever and funny, is now feel­ing pretty damn stupid.

2 responses to “So much to learn, so little time”:

1. • By:Cheryl
   • July 13th, 2007
   

   Having worked for a sim­i­lar com­pany and hav­ing a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion hap­pen, I can totally see how this slipped through. (I’m not say­ing it’s right, just that I can see how it happened).

   I’ve been in a sit­u­a­tion where the agency (who makes ads for a liv­ing and should have known bet­ter) didn’t get a model to sign a release… I think the prob­lem is a lot of agen­cies are cre­atively led but not that inter­net savvy, it’s quite new for them — so I can see how they got excited that there were so many flickr pho­tos with cre­ative com­mons and they just assumed that meant they could use it for free. To their credit Virgin Mobile do post the URL of the flickr photo they are using, at least they did in the last ads I saw. I’m sure the legal team that signed off on the ads aren’t inter­net law spe­cial­ists, they are prob­a­bly cor­po­rate lawyers.

   FWIW, I really liked the Virgin Mobile ads.

2. • By:admin
   • July 13th, 2007
   

   Shameless mar­ket­ing plug — we have a ses­sion in the con­fer­ence focussing on intel­lec­tual prop­erty, pri­vacy and other related issues. With the rise of “user gen­er­ated con­tent”, and cre­ative com­mons type licenses, this is going to be a sig­nif­i­cant issue that not only lawyers will need to be aware of.

   john

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