Allison Chang and Justin Ho-Wee Wong sued Australian-based Virgin Mobile Pty Ltd. alleging a number of tort claims including misappropriation of Chang's right of publicity. Plaintiffs claimed that Virgin wrongfully used Chang's picture in an Australian advertising campaign. Virgin obtained the photo, taken by Wong, off of Flickr, where Wong uploaded it attaching a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. Chang argued that the court could exercise personal jurisdiction based on three contacts: 1. Virgin accessing a Flickr server located in Texas, 2. Virgin's contract (i.e. the Creative Commons license) with Wong, a Texas resident, and 3. the intrastate effects of Virgin's use of Chang's photograph in the advertising campaign. The court found that Chang was not able to sufficiently establish personal jurisdiction based of these contacts. Read why the court decided this and see the ad here.
I was pretty surprised to read that the plaintiff lost this appropriation case where Virgin blatantly pulled the picture off of Flickr and used it in their ad. I think the biggest factor in Virgin's win in this case was that the ad was only in Australia, but it also just goes to show that not all right of publicity cases are won by the plaintiff.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
The part I don't understand is why Chang wasn't able to establish which server on which her photo was kept. It seems that wouldn't be something hard to pinpoint and prove at all, but then I've never tried either. I wonder if she could have established that it was on the Texas server if that would have made a difference.
Meanwhile, it makes me think even more about uploading images of myself, my friends or my family anywhere ever again. This sort of thing seems to be happening more and more often.
Post a Comment