So imagine that you’re at an event with friends and someone takes a picture of you. Then, that exact photo ends-up in an ad for a cellular phone company — without your consent! Can you imagine?

That’s exactly what happened to Alison Chang of Bedford, Texas after attending a church camp in Australia. A camp counselor simply snapped a candid shot and innocuously uploaded it to Flickr for friends to see. Someone who handles Australia Virgin Mobile’s advertising decided to use the photo in a huge ad campaign. I’m assuming they decided to use the photo because Alison was making a “V” with her fingers (like the peace symbol) which undoubtedly ties-in to Virgin’s marketing efforts — “V” for victory, “V” for Virgin. The insulting aspect of this is that there’s copy at the bottom which states “Free Text Virgin to Virgin Calls”. Of course, the company is referring to calling plans, but inferences can be made. Ones that I’m sure made Alison, her family, and other members of her church group a bit embarrassed.

In a nutshell, advertisers need to obtain a Model Release before an image of someone is used like this. For that reason, Alison’s family is suing Virgin. (The lawsuit has not been heard in court as of Sept. 24, 2007 — we’ll keep you updated once we hear of an outcome).

Personally, I can’t believe that an ad firm would be this lazy and arrogant. This image would be too easy to recreate and they could have saved themselves a lot of grief. The ad did contain small type indicating that the photo was from one of Flickr’s accounts but the question is whether or not that’s legal. See the discussion on Flickr, including Alison’s comments.

Until that question is answered make sure to smile — you may have a starring role in the next big ad campaign.

Here’s the video, as reported by CNN. Kolbrener, for the record, does not endorse the approach used by Virgin, nor would we ever consider trying something similar.