&gt;The big political parties spend literally half a billion dollars a year on advertising. If they find a photo good enough to go on the front page of their website, they are perfectly willing to make that photographer&#x27;s year, and they&#x27;re not going to skimp on something that important.<p>I&#x27;m actually surprised that a major campaign would just see a CC photo on flickr and decide to use it (assuming that&#x27;s what happened). Pretty much no ad agency or other non-editorial user would do such a thing. There&#x27;s too much risk that the photographer could object to the use (in spite of the CC licensing) or didn&#x27;t actually own the rights to the image in question or had exclusively licensed it to someone. As someone else pointed out, they&#x27;re not even using the image in a way that technically meets the letter of all the CC license requirements.