I am a web designer and a photographer, this is my personal online portfolio and blog

I want to draw anyone’s attention that is currently contributing to sxc.hu to the following statement and discussion:

Having used the example of a Virgin Mobile case, where a company used an image with a creative commons license from Flickr in an allegedly libelous manner for one of their advertising campaigns, as a reason why model releases are now required on sxc.hu in order to “protect photographers from being sued”, I noticed having read the ensuing article that the photographer was in fact a plaintiff in the case, and was seeking damages from both the company and the image license distributor (Creative Commons Corp) involved, along with the subject of the photograph, a young girl.

It seems that this new sxc policy, is not to protect the photographer at all, but rather to protect the end-user of the image, and themselves as the image licence distributor. They have even gone so far as to say that, they can no longer protect any sxc.hu contributor’s images that are not model-released, from abuse. In essence this means, if you currently have un-released images of friends and family on the sxc.hu web site, they will NO LONGER protect you, the photographer, if a down-loader uses your image in a libelous or otherwise damaging manner.

This makes the actual image license on sxc.hu in the case of images containing people without a model release, null and void, as they will not enforce the terms of the image licence with down-loaders.

So be careful!!

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