[nice_byte]

the "porn" angle is very funny to me, since there is nothing pornographic or inapropriate about the image. when I was young, I used to think it was some researcher's wife whom he loved so much he decide to use her picture absolutely everywhere.

it's sufficient to say that the person depicted has withdrawn their consent for that image to be used, and that should put an end to the conversation.

[exe34]

is that how consent works? I would have expected licenses would override that. although it's possible that the original use as a test image may have violated whatever contract she had with her producer in the first place.

[nice_byte]

tl;dr yes it is

she did not explicitly consent for that photo to be used in computer graphics research or millions of sample projects. moreover, the whole legality of using that image for those purposes is murky because I doubt anyone ever received proper license from the actual rights-holder (playboy magazine). so the best way to go about this is just common-sense good-faith approach: if the person depicted asks you to please knock it off, you just do it, unless you actively want to be a giant a-hole to them.

[killerstorm]

That's nonsense. If Carrie Fisher "withdrawn consent" of her depiction in Star Wars, should we destroy the movies, all Princess Leia fan art, etc?

[wizzwizz4]

No, because the replacement value of those things to others is very high, and generally outweighs Carrie Fisher's objection. But we should take her objection into consideration going forwards. The Lena test image is very easy to replace, and it's not all that culturally significant: there's no reason to keep using it, unless we need to replicate historical benchmarks.