Is there are thread on this? I apologize if there is.
Link
What do you want to debate?
I wanted to read the debate. I am amazed if this is the first thread.
Quote from article-
"A Texas family has sued Australia’s Virgin Mobile phone company, claiming it caused their teenage daughter grief and humiliation by plastering her photo on billboards and website advertisements without consent.
The family of Alison Chang says Virgin Mobile grabbed the picture from Flickr, Yahoo Inc’s popular photo-sharing website, and failed to credit the photographer by name."
Keep reading:
Looks like they may not have had to ID the photographer by name.
That’s what I was wondering. Does having the address of the flickr page constitute crediting the photographer? And even if it did, wouldn’t the company still have needed to get a release from the girl in the picture? Just because she gave her permission for the counselor to take her picture doesn’t mean anyone can use that picture for anything without asking her, right?
I am interested in seeing where the notion of digital property goes within corporate online communities.
The answer is “maybe”. By posting the photograph under the creative commons license, I think the photographer has lost any right to protest its use by Virgin. But there’s a seperate issue involved - the subject’s right of ownership to the commercial value of her public image. And that’s a fairly recent and nebulous area of the law and varies widely between jurisdictions. In some states like California or Tennessee, she’d be able to make a case that Virgin needed to negotiate an agreement with her before using her image in a commercial manner. But I don’t know what Texas law says on this.
Looks like a cash grab attempt to me. She looks somewhat goofy in the picture, but I don’t see anything remotely grievous or humiliating about it.
I think it was the tagline appended at the bottom that sparked the lawsuit. Apparently the text on the picture said, “Dump your pen friend.” and the caption at the bottom of the ad was “Free text virgin to virgin.” Apparently she was ridiculed at school and wants recompense from the company.
[hijack] did anybody else notice that the pic in the ad is the reverse of the original?
Anybody know why this is?
If they were working off a negative, I would think they put the neg in the enlarger backward.
[/hijack]
She is sixteen. If anyone in the entire world finds her, or the context of the ad to be be prurient, it’s child pornography. Virgin to virgin has a sexual context. She is a minor. Looks to me like jail time.
Tris
“It’s the tag line; it’s derogatory,” said Damon Chang, 27. “A lot of her church friends saw it.”
What church does she belong to where “virgin” is considered slanderous to a teenage girl? (And more importantly, why didn’t my parents try to raise me in that denomination?)
Had she been carefully crafting a reputation as the parish slut until this little setback?
You can’t possibly be serious. If anyone snaps a street scene that happens to contain teenagers and someone is aroused by it, the photographer is criminally liable for producing child porn? I’d really like to see the law on this.
You have to remember that in the high school realm, any excuse to heap abuse on someone is a good excuse. Regardless of whether or not virgin is an insult or compliment, the fact is that because of the ad, school was made traumatic for her and therefore the company owes her financial recompense.
That’s my guess as to the reasoning behind the lawsuit.
The tag line is “Dump Your Pen Friend”, and I assume the implication is that the girl in the image is a person you should stop communicating with.
Ah, so if she’s assumed to be the “pen friend,” it follows that she would not be one of the “virgins” indicated in the “virgin to virgin” tagline.
Which doesn’t actually preclude her from being a virgin as well, really. She could be a virginal “pen friend.” (I’m working on the assumption that the term is synonymous with “pen pal”— does anyone even have those anymore? Epistolary friendships between convicts and their fans “on the outside,” or between doughy, balding American men and Russian women angling for a green card?) How would you know anything about a “pen friend’s” sex life unless she revealed it to you? Once you fuck a pen pal, doesn’t the relationship change? Letters become more strained, topics awkward? I just received your letter of two weeks ago— I feel like you’re strangling me! I need my space!
I don’t know, man. As in the recent “pumpkins are racist!” thread, I’m having trouble doodling this particular placemat to “Help the Asian person find her way through the maze to get to her TOTAL OUTRAGE!” I know it can be done; I just may need more crayons.
They published it. They wrote the deliberately suggestive slogan on to it. Publishing salacious photographs of a minor is a crime. People have been arrested for pictures of naked children in the bath, where innocence was manifest in every aspect of the act. This was not so wholly innocent.
I am not personally shocked by it, but it is undeniably published with at least a minor element of suggestive innuendo. The girl is undeniably a minor, and the ad has been distributed internationally. This violate local laws in several countries, and I think several treaty agreements among those countries. The corporation has little choice than to pay whatever it takes to keep this event out of any court. A couple of million dollars paid up real quick might keep the matter a civil one.
The child pornography laws were written by people who wanted the most stringent standards in all the communities into which such material might be published to be applied. So, even if the age of consent for sex is 12 in your home jurisdiction, publication of pictures of anyone not legally documented to be over 18 years of age is in fact a federal crime if it is felt to be salacious in any community where it was available.
“Virgin to virgin” is very obviously intended to be a sexual reference.
Tris
Probably because they liked the composition better flipped.
It is Virgin Mobile, you realise? They’ve been using that slogan for their phones for a long time.
Though they have used the slogan in a more deliberate way before now, it’s always been very clearly done humorously. Now it’s just their standard phrase in reference to the exclusivity of the offer.
In this particular case, the “Dump Your Pen Friend” tag doesn’t seem to be obviously connected to the term “virgin” at all.
It seems odd that a major company would use a recognizable image without thoroughly acquiring the rights first. Don’t they have a single lawyer on staff?