Australia Day Google doodle falls foul of copyright

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 27 January 2010 08:04

Your IT - Home IT

Google regularly marks significant events with special versions of its logo on the main search page. But the winning design for Australia Day had to be modified following a copyright issue.

The winning design in a competition to create a special Google logo for Australia Day used the yellow circle from the Aboriginal flag as the second O:














And that's where the problem started.

The Aboriginal flag - recognised under Australian law as one of the flags of Australia - was first used in the early 1970s and so is still under copyright. Harold Thomas was recognised as the author of the flag in 1997.

Here's how Google product marketing manager Katharina Friedrich put it: "You may have noticed that the Google Doodle on the homepage today is slightly different to [winning designer Jessie Du's] original entry, because that one contained copyright imagery that we weren't able to publish on the homepage today."

The modified version looked like this:













So what was the actual problem? See page 2.