Whoops! The BBC is paying a Birmingham photographer £75 for his trouble after using his copyrighted Flickr image as TV news backdrop without permission. Mike Bailey posted the image of the city’s skyline in July last year, under a general copyright license rather than the more liberal Creative Commons, before it was downloaded from another, unnamed site and aired on the BBC News channel.
The Register (first reported by BitterWallet) with the Beeb’s response, which admits to “human error” that it explains was “not deliberate”: “(The picture) was loaded into the system just as an example backdrop to internally test and calibrate new equipment. It was never meant to be used in broadcasts…” The response said the picture was grabbed not from Flickr but from a separate website that “appeared to make no reference to copyright and had no facility for copyright…”