Interesting story of a controversial use of someone’s Flickr photo by Virgin Mobile.

AdRants reports that the family of someone is suing Virgin for using his photograph grabbed off Flickr for the ad campaign .

Which brings up the question: is it OK to use/link to someone’s picture because it is out there on a Creative Commons license? Or the larger question: Is the model release form in need of a re-write?

I have put up some of my photos here on my blog, via Flickr. I have not deemed them private, and they fall under the Creative Commons license –meaning they could be used for commercial reasons as long as they attribute the source. But I have to be careful. I don’t use pictures of my friends or family in that album. I know some others do.

CC Chapman (above) for instance, the epitome of all things in the new media space, a huge advocate of the commons and networking has loads of pictures up there. Robert Scoble’s photos of family and colleagues are everywhere.

Note, I am not copying or uploading this image of CC. I am simply linking to the URL, using the WordPress “insert image here” field. (I’ve previously used the image upload feature, but apart from it being cumbersome, it’s never seemed fair to copy someone’s logo or image onto my hard drive and upload it without their permission.)

But to get back to Virgin, consider the medium the campaign is promoting: phones. Virgin’s agency could not have been ignorant of the copyright envelope they were pushing. My guess is that it half expected this to happen and like all things Virgin, decided it was just “doing a Branson.”

And just to capture a delicious irony of how a Flickr lawsuit could end up, there’s a picture of a settlement check one photographer received after suing a company that had used her Flickr photo. Yes, that settlement and the check is on Flickr !