Virgin angers bloggers by using Flickr pics without asking

When Virgin Mobile launched a new advertising campaign in Australia, their creative team thought that it would be amusing to take photographs posted on Flickr and label them with provocative slogans. A holiday snap of orange-robed monks in Thailand is captioned "monks are boring", while a group of friends at work appears with the slogan "work friends are just that".

So far so good. Virgin gets a cheap advertising campaign, amateur photographers get a showcase for their photos and their subjects bask in the limelight. Except that no one at Virgin thought it would be sensible to contact the photographers, let alone the people featured. So imagine 15-year-old Alison Chang’s surprise when someone saw her picture on a bus stop in Adelaide – under the slogan "dump your pen friend".

Her brother Damon, 27, was quick to take offence. "It is an invasion of her privacy because what they're writing is something derogatory," he told me. "They're basically saying dump any friends that look like my sister."

This is when the bloggers started going crazy. Flickr users started to debate the pros and cons of sharing their photos under the agreement of Creative Commons, the licence by which Virgin Mobile was able to reproduce and modify images while remaining within the law.

Debate quickly spread around the world: What’s the good of Creative Commons? Could the subject try to claim defamation in the courts? Did Virgin Mobile use the attribution under Creative Commons agreement appropriately? Was the whole thing just a cheap ad campaign? Not everyone was sympathetic. One blogger posted: "If ANY image is placed on the internet, it should be EXPECTED to be 'tagged', skewed, streched, flipped, inverted, grafitied & abused!"

Is that fair? I don’t think so. I certainly would not want my image posted worldwide under a mocking caption, helping to buy Richard Branson another hot-air balloon. But I might not have much say in that: after all, how do I know whether my friends have posted pictures of me on Flickr or other photo-sharing websites? The only way to be sure of that would be to forbid my friends from photographing me.

You won’t find the online adverts in their original form any more. By Tuesday, Virgin had responded to criticism and changed the images, replacing them with photos in which the subject’s faces aren’t visible. Rather surreally, the captions don’t quite match the pictures anymore.

From Jude Townend in Sydney, who reported on this story for The Australian