I'm reminded of these t-shirts with "Keep Calm And..." slogans that were allegedly generated automatically (presumably culled from web searches) and sold on Amazon without human intervention: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21640347
I think the lesson is, if your business model MUST involve pulling stuff from the Internet arbitrarily, it is no less your responsibility as if you had crafted it yourself if you intend to commercially repurpose it.
That company was actively engaged plagiarism and product is the trite rehash. The FB company wasn't selling the image per-se, but merely appropriating it for their service. If they were selling copies of Rehtaeh Parsons' image as a product itself rather than an uncredited and, as far as they're concerned, anonymous image of a girl to help them push the service, then they would be comparable.
I totally agree. If your actions result in something tasteless or harmful, then it is your fault that you haven't foreseen those consequences.
More likely, the dating site had somehow acquired knowledge of how many times the original hosted image was viewed and saw a visitor spike. Could be a direct or indirect partnership with facebook or some image hosting site, or could be their own hosted profiles. The sexual assault and the resulting death likely caused the increase.
I am a bit surprised that no one seems to blame Facebook in all this. Not only did they host the ad, they earned profit by doing so. It very likely that the ill-gotten profit from this event still persist in Facebooks bank account.
I can totally see the traffic spike = profit angle and that seems to be the most likely reason. If they're looking at raw data, then who the person is may not have even been a consideration.
Facebook does, of course, share blame in this since they allowed the ad to show up on their platform. If they did earn profit, they should do something like donate it to a fund that engages in bullying prevention.
Two weeks ago, Randomuser.me was advertised on Hacker News. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6313952). They claim all images are hand-picked, but of course there's no guarantee that a thing like this could happen to us Hacker News-hackers too.
Since the parent company of the dating site is based in Vietnam, this seems more likely than just maliciousness.
FB likely does no serious vetting of these images besides looking for obvious offensiveness and a face among a sea of faces isn't likely going to trigger any red flags. Besides that, they probably outsource their image vetting as well, so it's not unlikely the cultural disconnect played a part in this.