The Register is reporting that Virgin Mobile decide to run an ad campaign with user generated content. So what do you do if you’re Virgin? You look around for some content that’s licensed under Creative Commons with no restrictions on it’s commercial use.

Indeed they found a lot of content including the shots below. Unfortunately, the people involved they didn’t understand what they were doing and the poor girl got used in a campaign that’s kind of insulting.

Picture Via The Register Original location of image referenced by Virgin.

The net result is that they are suing Virgin and Creative Commons. I feel bad for the girl, who did’nt have any say in the matter, and for the family. If you’re interested here is the comment from the person who took the photo, Damon Wong. His main complaint is not being notified. I don’t think that’s part of the license. Attribution however is and he has a point there which might give him a case against Virgin.

But I don’t think they have much of a case against Creative Commons.

Creative Commons lets users choose what rights they want to reserve and it is hard to get more clear when the first question they ask when you get a license is “Allow commercial uses of your work?” and the second question is “Allow modifications of your work?” as you can see below. (Big ugly arrows added by me)

Lesson learned, if you care about your intellectual property rights read the instructions - it’s not that complicated.

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