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Google has become so accustomed to making huge piles of money off of free access to other people's property that they've kinda forgotten that other people besides them like to get paid every once in a while.
Mr. Taxali, an illustrator based in Toronto whose work has appeared in publications like Time, Newsweek and Fortune, received a call in April from a member of Google’s marketing department. According to Mr. Taxali, the Google representative explained that the project will let users customize Google Chrome pages with artist-designed “skins” in their borders.
“The first question I asked,” Mr. Taxali said in a recent interview, “is ‘What’s the fee?’”
Mr. Taxali said that when he was told Google would pay nothing, he declined.
In the ensuing weeks, a tide of indignation toward Google swelled among illustrators, who stay connected through Drawger, a Web site.
In a posting to Drawger on April 28, Mr. Taxali bemoaned the Google request — and that some struggling publications were reducing fees to illustrators by nearly half.
“So for you, I give you a special salute that I hope will keep you away because I don’t need your work,” Mr. Taxali wrote, followed by his own drawing of a hand gesture popular with impatient motorists.
The posting drew more than 200 responses, many from other illustrators who also had rejected Google’s offer, including Joe Ciardiello, of New Jersey, whose pen drawings of authors appear frequently on the cover of The New York Times Book Review.
“You’d think that if anyone can afford to pay artists and designers it would be a company that is making millions of dollars,” Mr. Ciardiello said in an interview.
In the first quarter of this year alone, Google reported profits of $1.42 billion, an increase of 8 percent over the same period last year.
Tom Tomorrow, the furthest thing from some kind of free-market property rights right-winger, gets it:
Paying in “exposure” is how underfunded and/or miserly publications have wheedled free art out of illustrators for a very long time. The logic goes like this: we can’t afford to pay you, but your work will be exposed to someone who can. Exposure is the bottom rung on the ladder, one step toward a career in which people value the work you do enough to pay you for it. The problem is when you reach the very top of the ladder and the same argument is being used. Where exactly are you supposed to go from there?
And as artists are fond of pointing out, the local grocery store is unlikely to accept “exposure” in payment for a gallon of milk.
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Author: Tom Giovanetti || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA