With The Twitter busting out all over, Simon Oxely's little bird is everywhere these days, including this revealing article in WIRED:

An iStockphoto spokeswoman told wired.com that Twitter paid between $10 and $15 for Oxley's bird design. Considering that iStockphoto pays 20 or 40 percent to content creators depending on their membership, Oxley made somewhere between $2 and $6 for designing the Twitter homepage graphic. Carolyn Davidson, who famously earned only $35 for designing the Nike swoosh, actually made out pretty well by comparison.

The article spawned a small avalanche of blog posts relating the tale of an artist getting taken for $6, but all seemed to omit a key point that's only mentioned at the end of the article:

Oxley's bird design remains on the site where it can be licensed under the same terms Twitter received. Nothing is stopping people from making sites that ape, mock or build upon Twitter using its own official graphic.

Unlike the Nike Swoosh, Twitter doesn't have exclusive use of the little bird and Simon retains full ownership. Oxley, who is always recycling elements, has three versions of that file with two thousand combined downloads and many more sales from other variations ... do the math and you'll see that, financially, he's left the Nike woman in the dust (except that she went on to work at Nike and was eventually compensated for her inspiration).

10:44 PM , # , |

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