January 26th, 2010 by Geoff

Google seems to be in the news every single day. Whether it is relating to a legal issue which has gone to court, or a political battle with a Government regarding hacking and search limitations.
The latest piece of news to stir up bad press for the search giant has come from down under in Australia. A competition took place for people to design a variation of the ‘Google’ image and have it displayed on the homepage, a competition widely run worldwide called Doodle for Google.
The winning image which can be seen below in it’s original form was designed by an 11 year old girl and showed the countries well known animals along with a flag of indigenous Australians marked behind the second ‘O’.
On the left you can see the original image and left the final image which made it on to Google:
An issue arose when the flag was taken out of the second image as Google would not meet the copywriter holder fee to use the image.
Google were said to have offered “a pittance” for the image rights, while Mr. Thomas who holds the rights said that Google hadn’t ever held proper negotiations with him over the fee for use. Google stated that they couldn’t use the original image as they “weren’t able to publish on the homepage”.
Google has been criticised in Australia for the removal and the missing flag has made for a disgruntled reaction in forums across the internet.
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