Asked to Donate Work for Nothing, Artists Flip Google the Bird

"I should do a freebie for Google? What's the matter, do they have a tin cup and an eye patch on the street? F**K NO!"

Though none of the artists solicited to donate their work for nothing to Google Chrome actually said that, they might well have paraphrased Harlan Ellison's foaming-at-the-mouth rant against Warner Bros. and all other corporate patrons that think they're doing writers and artists a favor by displaying their work.

Canadian-based illustrator Gary Taxali's written response to Google was slightly more printable than Ellison's, but the writer would certainly agree with the graphic one issued by the artist (left). Here's what Taxali had to say:

DON’T CALL ME
In the last little while, there has been a MAJOR backslide in the industry. Poor rates have been an issue for a while but things are becoming worse. Clients fees are getting even lower and the rights theyre demanding are even higher.

You want examples? How about SWATCH calling me and asking me to design a watch. They wanted a complete transfer of copyright for a paltry fee. As if thats going to happen. Google calls me and wants my work for their new search engine all over the web, the fee? Nothing. Editorial clients are slashing 1999s fees almost in half and citing the bad economy as an excuse. You know what? My excuse is that the economy is bad so you have to pay me MORE for an illustration. Hows that for an economic stimulus package?

So heres to every client with shitty fees and terms. Do not waste my time or contact me. I am very busy working with clients who respect artists and youre wasting my time with your solicitations. So for you, I give you a special salute that I hope will keep you away because I dont need your work.

According to Andrew Adam Newman writing in the New York Times about the Taxali-inspired uprising, his posting on Drawger "drew more than 200 responses, many from other illustrators who also had rejected Google’s offer." Newman quotes another illustrator, Brian Stauffer, who also turned Google down. “When a company like Google comes out very publicly and expects that the market would just give them free artwork, it sets a very dangerous precedent.”

Sadly, there are plenty of artists who need the exposure and will take Google up on its offer.

And of course, Google may feel it needs an eye patch and tin cup. It only squeaked by the first quarter of 2009 with a $1.42 billion profit.

You can read the whole story in Newman's Use Their Work Free? Some Artists Say No to Google. You can also Catch a snatch of Ellison's fulmination on YouTube and buy it online.

Richard Curtis
PS: This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times. I want to acknowledge the newspaper's invaluable contribution. A free society cannot endure without its newspapers. We must strive to find a way to rescue the industry. Until then the least that caring individuals can do is buy a paper on the street or purchase a subscription. Support the New York Times.

A Google-Fu Master Unlocks the Wall Street Journal. Or, How I Know Subscription Model Won't Work for Online News

Though I possess the technical skill of a herring I easily accessed the text of a Wall Street Journal article that the newspaper's website requires a subscription to read in its entirety. In the hope of saving the news gathering industry a lot of grief and money I'm going to tell them how I did it. And in the hope of saving the news gathering industry, period, I'm going to urge them to seek a different business model than one that prohibits readers from reading complete stories unless they become subscribers. You might as well try to carry water in a sieve.

It started with an item on a British website called Book Trade News, to which I have a free subscription. Every day or so the site emails me a digest of book industry-related stories, some of which I select as possibly blogworthy.

Today I received the following item: S&P Cuts Bertelsmann Ratings On Debt Levels, Ad Woes. The subhead was: Ratings closer to junk territory. If anything is blogworthy, the reduction of Bertelsmann's Standard & Poor ratings to near-junk certainly is.

To follow up on this intriguing hint, I clicked on the hotlink that took me to Book Trade News's website. There I found this short abstract:

Standard & Poor's Ratings Services cut its ratings on international media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG closer to junk territory, saying declining advertising will hurt results this year.

The rating agency also noted Europe's largest media company's leverage is high for its rating level, BBB.

The abstract was followed by a hotlink to the source of the story, "Wall Street Journal item". I clicked on it and got the same tease followed by a hotlink that said, "To continue reading, subscribe now". When I clicked on it, I was taken to a page offering various subscription packages and their costs.

Okay, fair enough. But I wondered if I could get around the requirement to subscribe. Out of curiosity I copied the opening sentence of their teaser, pasted it into a Google search box, and hit "Enter". It took me (in 0.26 seconds) to a page of Google listings: the very first item displayed was the exact same opening line of the Journal story. I clicked on it and was taken to the wsj.com page. There I found the complete text I was looking for, but it was overlaid with graphic material that appeared to be intended to block my reading or copying. Now what?

Determined, I highlighted the entire page, copied it and pasted it into a Word document. The junk that had obscured my view disappeared and the text came out clean, legible and - free!

To make sure this wasn't a fluke, later in the day I tried it again. This time Google took me to the same wsj.com page but without the garbage: the complete and unabridged story (actually a Dow Jones item) stared me in the face. I did not have to pay a dime to subscribe.

You can read the Bertelsmann story in its entirety by clicking on the above hotlink.. But that's not the point. Here's the point: as passionately as we all long to see the newspaper and magazine industries survive, I'm skeptical that restricting stories to subscribers will work. As much as I hate the Information Wants to Be Free concept, it's unrealistic to think that information can be withheld from determined seekers. All the more dismaying is that an apparently secure system yielded to a complete amateur. Yielded, in fact, with scarcely any resistance at all.

My technical guru has since informed me that the procedure I instinctively followed is called Google-Fu, which Chris Perillo defines as “the ability to quickly answer any given question using internet resources, such as a search engine. It’s a Zen concept, if you will. The better and faster you become at finding the right answers quickly online, the higher your 'Google-Fu rating'”. Check out his video explanation of the term to a chat-room caller.

Here's the bottom line: information must either be locked up behind an unassailable firewall or we have to find a different way to monetize it. Armed with nothing but my trusty mouse, I laid siege to the Journal's firewall and it came tumbling down in moments.

I'm no Houdini, but at least I can now run with with the geeks. When they ask me what was my finest hack, I'll shrug modestly and say, "Wall Street Journal. Yeah, I Google-Fu'd it. Piece of cake."

Richard Curtis

Why We Must Not Let Newspapers and Magazines Fail

The Op-Ed Page of the New York Times (Sunday, May 15th) carries an absolutely blood-freezing contribution by Mark Danner. Danner, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, managed to get his hands on a report prepared by the Red Cross after a unit of the humane organization visited Guantánamo late in 2006 to review the prison's interrogation procedures. Its report was given in strictest secrecy to the CIA.

"A short time ago," Danner writes, "this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity." Tales From Torture’s Dark World is a condensed version of that NYRB article adapted for the Times.

That the barbaric methods used to interrogate the prisoners, authorized at the highest levels of the US government, border on atrocity will be self-evident to anyone who who has a heart (Dick Cheney excepted). But what I wondered as I read it is whether the Red Cross's report would ever have come to light without the investigative spirit and courage of Danner and the publications that sponsored him. Though abstracts of his report will appear on countless blogs, would any of them have been willing to invest their own resources to initiate the kind of probe he undertook? It's one thing for bloggers to tread the path blazed by pioneers, but would any of them have the guts to break the story and risk prosecution or harassment?

I don't think so.

I won't try to match the eloquence of those who have appealed for humanitarian treatment of combatants and political prisoners. Nor can I judge the guilt or innocence prisoners from whom confessions were extracted by the cruelest forms of coercion. "From everything we know," Danner writes, "many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be 'brought to justice,' as President Bush vowed they would be."

No, the reason I'm writing this is to remind you that truth and openness, the pillars on which western civilization rest, depend on newspapers and magazines as well as book publishers such as those publishing these revelations. We also depend on writers like Danner to interpret those revelations and place them in a moral context such as this one:

"The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured - and have already done so at Guantánamo - means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which 'torture doesn’t work.' The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed."

This website has carried many items about the efforts of print publishers to arrest their sickening financial freefall. Some of these ideas are viable and some are not. The issues underlying the rescue of publishers caught up in a devastating paradigm shift are complex and challenging. But we have to find a solution.

Investigative journalism is the lantern we shine on the slimy horrors crawling under the rocks of our society. We must- must - find a way to preserve it.

Richard Curtis