Lawsuit Against Creative Commons Dropped
Photo-sharing copyright license is unclear, says family whose daughter's image was used in an ad.
Grant Gross, IDG News Service
A Texas family has dropped its lawsuit against the
nonprofit Creative Commons copyright licensing organization, after an
apparent misunderstanding over commercial use of a photo of a teenage
member of the family.
Susan Chang of Dallas, filed the lawsuit in September against Creative Commons,
Virgin Mobile USA and Virgin Mobile of Australia, alleging that the
Australian company's use of her daughter's photo in an advertising
campaign violated her privacy rights. But Justin Wong, the photographer
who took the photo, posted the image on the Flickr photo-sharing site
under the Creative Commons Attribution copyright license, which allows
others, including commercial entities, to reuse the copyright work
without paying for it.
Susan Chang and Wong accused Creative
Commons of failing to "adequately educate and warn him .... of the
meaning of commercial use and the ramifications and effects of entering
into a license allowing such use," according to their complaint.
Chang
and Wong dropped the lawsuit against Creative Commons and Virgin Mobile
USA Tuesday. Their lawyer, Ryan Zehl, said the plaintiffs instead would
focus on their lawsuit against Virgin Mobile of Australia.
Chang
and Wong weren't seeking monetary damages from Creative Commons, Zehl
said. Instead, they wanted the organization to add three sentences to
its licenses clarifying that the license doesn't deal with privacy
rights, he said. "There's only so far we can go with spending money
without getting money in return," he said.
Creative Commons,
launched in 2001, attempts to give copyright holders additional options
for licensing their work. The organization has created a series of
licenses between full copyright, in which all rights are reserved, and
the public domain, in which no rights are reserved. The group's six
licenses attempt to allow creators to have "some rights reserved."
Three of the six licenses forbid commercial use without permission.
Creative
Commons said Chang and Wong didn't have a strong case. Flickr users do
not have to license their photos or allow reuse, and the Creative
Commons licensing is not the default option, the organization said.
"Although
we are confident that any court would have agreed that there was no
valid legal claim against us, this is a good result," the organization
said in a statement.
Still Creative Commons founder and CEO
Lawrence Lessig said the organization will look at ways to make its
licenses clearer to users.
"The fact that the laws of the
United States don't make us liable for the misuse in this context
doesn't mean that we're not working extremely hard to make sure misuse
doesn't happen," Lessig wrote on his blog.
"It is always a problem (even if not a legal problem) when someone
doesn't understand what our licenses do, or how they work. We need to
work harder to make that clear."
Zehl said he's not convinced
Creative Commons will make license changes his plaintiffs have asked
for. The organization so far has not acted, he said. "Maybe they will,
maybe they won't," he said. "We can't spend all day trying to get them
to do something they should've done in the first place."
The lawsuit cost the nonprofit about US$15,000, Lessig wrote.
Lessig
also apologized for the confusion. "We thought the meaning was clear,"
he said. "We work hard to make this as clear as we can. We will work
harder."
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