May

Snippets: More logo tattoos, photographers sue Google & yet another plagiarism freak out

Steve Douglas on May 6th, 2010

Here’s a couple of interesting bits about logo tattoos. First up: Casa Sanchez, a San Francisco taqueria is offering a lifetime’s worth of Tacos for anyone who gets the restaurant’s logo inked on their person. Not the first time either. Casa Sanchez ran a similar promotion te years ago, and was even voted as ‘one of the best marketing campaigns of the year‘ by Forbes Magazine. How many Taco’s that work out to? Greg Tietz, one of the customers who inked up back then, reckons he’s had at least a couple of hundred free meals since. Meanwhile, Brazilian soccer club Vasco da Gama fired up their own promotion, offering supporters a free team jersey if they got a tattoo of the team’s emblem – a Templar Cross – as part of an attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the most tattoos in a 24 hour period. The team announced the results via a dedicated Twitter page and ultimately beat the previous record of 801 tattoos by 4. [ABC and USA Today]

Despite trying to be all things to all people, apparently not everyone loves the Google. The American Society of Media Photographers for example, who’ve filed a class action copyright infringement suit against the search engine giant, alleging that big G’s Library Project amounts to nothing more that the “illegal scanning of millions of books and other publications containing copyrighted images and displaying them to the public without regard to the rights of the visual creators“. ASMP and the other trade associations decided to file the class action after their request to join a currently pending $125 million suit, filed on behalf of text authors making similar claims, was denied by the Courts. According to their press release, the “new class action goes beyond Google’s Library Project, and includes Google’s other systematic and pervasive infringements of the rights of photographers, illustrators and other visual artists.” Interesting to see how this pans out, though Google’s record of winning similar copyright and legal challenges has been pretty decent. [ASMP]

Yet another art competition. Yet another scandal. Yet another internet freak out. In what is becoming a regular occurrence, the internet blew up a couple of days ago when a young artist went to the web for help, over her work being knocked off, entered into the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers Competition (sponsored by Scholastic), winning two gold medals and the $10,000 booty. Wenqing Yan‘s drawing, “Selfish” had been entered into the contest by another artist who also hangs out on various art related sites, most notably Deviant Art (where the piece was grabbed). After Yan’s repeated contact attempts (and even a DMCA takedown letter) were ignored by competition officials, she went public, posting a plea on her Deviant Art account. The result was predictable with outraged supporters hammering the Scholastic Facebook page, Reddit, Digg and anywhere else they could publish the story. Eventually, the mess was sorted out, the copier admitting the copying, and Yan getting some of the recognition she deserves. Sadly, she won’t be getting the award, originally won by her work, because Scholastic announced they’ll be picking another winner. [Plagiarism Today]

If you run a blog, and even though you’ve probably got your spam comment filters cranked to ‘overdrive’ there’s probably more than a few dodgy ones get through. Admittedly, some make for interesting reading. Just received this comment on our recycling logo piece, and to be honest, I’ve absolutely no idea WTF this comment means.

Obviously the comment is auto-generated, and hurled at the blog to score some search engine friendly linkatude for ‘home design’ (see our SEO and logo designers piece for a lot more on this) but gotta admit I’m a little perplexed what Cristina, our little spam bot, is trying to say. Apparently someone called Hell‘s been hanging around the blog, The Factor is a big concern, and “needs to be eliminated from the society as soon as possible.”

Ooh, that can’t be good.

Have an interesting blog piece, logo or ‘different’ take on the graphic design industry that might make interesting fodder for an upcoming Snippet feature? Feel free to drop us a line. You can also hit us up on Twitter.