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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