Google Australia Day flag row
p2pnet view P2P:- Today is Australia Day. And 11-year-old Jessie Du designed a special Google logo to mark it.
“The flag represents peace with countries,” news.com.au has Jessie, whose design won the Doodle 4 Google competition run in Australian schools, saying.
But “the image on Google’s home page has removed the flag, leaving only a central yellow circle with the flag’s colours still barely visible around the edges,” says the story.
How come?
The editing was down to a copyright dispute, says the Sydney Morning Herald.
Flag designer Harold Thomas refused to give Google permission to reproduce the design on its website, Google said, according to the story, which goes on to quote a spokeswoman as stating:
“We were willing to do pretty much whatever we could but in the end he decided that he just wasn’t happy with it.”
But Thomas says he refused “only because Google did not approach him in a respectful way and had demanded to reproduce the flag without charge,” says the SMH.
“I said well you can use it but there’s a fee component and the [Google] person said: ‘Oh we can’t do that, we can’t pay for it, we’ll have to ask the girl to change it [the logo] if we have to pay for it’ ,” Thomas declares in the story.
“So ever since that time we’ve been argy bargying over how we should go about it and in the end it was a pittance offer so I decided why bother?”
Google “denies this but would not provide further comment,” says the SMH.
Thomas says he allows health, education, legal and other organisations that help Aboriginal people free use of the flag, “but generally charged a fee to commercial entities”.
“They didn’t give me a straight-out offer,” he’s quoted as saying, “and with all their money and machinery and know-how, they should have known what to do – it’s as simple as that.”
(Cheers, Andrew aka Comeonecomcast)
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news.com.au – Google erases Aboriginal flag from Australia Day doodle on homepage, January 26, 2010
Sydney Morning Herald – Oh dear: Google flagged over logo dispute, January 26, 2010
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