Twitter Paid $6 or Less for Crowdsourced ‘Birdie’ Graphic | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Paid $6 or Less for Crowdsourced ‘Birdie’ Graphic

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19 pointstfincannon10 comments

This is just straight up linkbait. We're supposed to be mad because they bought a cheap graphic on iStock and don't credit the designer? Isn't that the point of buying rights to stock photos/graphics?

http://twiter.com/ (a misspelling) uses it too. Purchased from the same place.

The article title is misleading. Twitter bought the rights to use the image and they did this on istockphoto.com.

What makes it misleading? It says just that. Although the article also says that by not buying the _exclusive_ rights to the image the 'cheap logo'-trick might backfire when other (twitter-like) websites would (legally) use the same image.

"Nothing is stopping people from making sites that ape, mock or build upon Twitter using its own official graphic."

Looks like there was some back-and-forth with claims of a misleading title in the comments on the article. Rather than try and keep up with what was changed and when, I dropped all interest with what the author had to say due to their shoddy writing style.

It's up to interpretation whether or not the title is "misleading," but one thing is for certain—it's definitely sensationalist.

To me, stock photography/illustrations have nothing to do with "crowdsourcing," (e.g.: 99designs, LogoTournament).

It seems to me that ambiguity in iStockPhoto's license could mean Twitter would owe many thousands of dollars for this.. hear me out :)

The iStockPhoto standard license has an easily ignored, and rather confusing, clause:

[You may not] either individually or in combination with others, reproduce the Content, or an element of the Content, in excess of 500,000 times without obtaining an Extended License, in which event you shall be required to pay an additional royalty fee equal to US $0.01 for each reproduction which is in excess of 500,000 reproductions. This additional royalty does not apply to advertisements in magazines, newspapers or websites or to broadcast by television, web-cast or theatrical production.

"advertisements in magazines, newspapers or websites" is ambiguous. I first read it as meaning "(advertisements) in (magazines, newspapers or websites)" and the error page on Twitter is not an advertisement. But if this were so, then wouldn't pretty much any graphic purchased from iStockPhoto end up being used over 500,000 times eventually on the Web? Twitter would probably owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties.

Or is it "(advertisements in magazines), (newspapers) or (websites)" in which case, fine. Hurrah for vague legal wording! It's a shame it's so vague because it does open things up for interpretation.

Online or electronic publications or uses, including web pages to a maximum image size of 800 x 600 pixels... is covered by the Standard License (http://www.istockphoto.com/license_comparison.php)

The impression count is seemingly for offline reproduction.

Cool comparison table, and hopefully that would be a good defence if iStockPhoto ever came to annoy anyone, but still.. that table doesn't quite match with what the actual license text says :-( (which is, I suspect, the legal version of events)

The issue is relevant for stock photographers who were the audience of the RT since the price is considerably less than traditional home page logo licensing. that's all.

You know they paid even less for their architecture.

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