(6x6) Blog » Bing http://blog.taitsimpson.com 6x6 is the blog of editorial and commercial photographer Tait Simpson. Brooklyn, New York creating artistic environmental portraits and landscape images. Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:05:49 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Work for Google for Free? http://blog.taitsimpson.com/2009/06/work-for-google-for-free/ http://blog.taitsimpson.com/2009/06/work-for-google-for-free/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:12:47 +0000 tait http://blog.taitsimpson.com/?p=630 The NY Times published an article yesterday about the Google Chrome project where illustrators were asked to provide original artwork for free to be used as skins or a facade for the new browser. It is not surprising and quite disturbing first that Google, a company that reported $1.4 billion dollars in profits in the first quarter of this year alone, is asking artists, who rely on commissions of this type to survive, to submit their original work for free. Second, there was little resistance on the part of the artists themselves to these egregious terms. Some would say that we’ve brought this upon ourselves, that the community has set a dangerous precedent. But if that is true, it follows that the artistic community, both illustrators and photographers (because this happens all too often to us as well), must stand together against this type of devaluation of our hard work.

Either way, I encourage anyone who makes a living from creative work to send an email to Google expressing your disapproval. I know what you are thinking, it is naïve to think that any grassroots effort on our part will in any way effect the practices of a corporation the size of Google. However, if we sit idly by and watch it happen, we are tacitly expressing our approval of this type of treatment making it ever more difficult for creative people to make a living creating.

UPDATE 6/25/09

So it seems that all of a sudden there is a new browser competing for our searches: Microsoft’s Bing. I’m not entirely sure that Microsoft is any less of a megalomaniacal corporation than Google, but here’s to hoping that they’ll at least give Google a run for their money and possibly contest their dominance (which obviously has a great deal to do with the reasoning behind their unethical behavior as noted above: it is because they CAN). A little competition would be good for everyone involved, so I’ll be giving Bing a try and who knows maybe I’ll end up preferring it.

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