How The Public Domain Coronavirus 'Beauty Shot' You Now See Everywhere Came To Be

from the public-domain-ftw dept

By now, you've probably seen this image of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 a million times:

It's freaking everywhere. And it's in the public domain. That's because it was created by employees at the CDC, and as a work of the US government it is exempt from copyright laws, meaning anyone can use it. Which is probably why everyone uses it. One of the many reasons why a public domain is so useful.

The NY Times has a nice story about how the image came to be that's well worth reading.

On Jan. 21, the day after the C.D.C. activated its emergency operations center for the new coronavirus, Ms. Eckert and her colleague Dan Higgins were asked to create “an identity” for the virus. “Something to grab the public’s attention,” she said. Ms. Eckert expected that whatever they came up with might appear on a few cable news programs, as their creations had in the past.

Instead, as the pandemic spread and intensified, their rendering’s reach did, too. “It started popping up around the world,” she said.

The story goes into a fair bit of detail about how it was created and also some of the design choices that Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgns made to make that design so memorable.

They chose a stony texture, wanting it to seem like “something that you could actually touch,” Ms. Eckert said. Other details — like the level of realism and the lighting, which has the spikes cast long shadows — were calibrated to “help display the gravity of the situation and to draw attention,” she said.

After reading about that, I discovered that there were a variety of other images of this particular coronavirus used around the globe. Here's just a few (there are so many more...):

Indeed, this is the image that the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has been using:

Not quite as nice as the CDC's... and thanks to more murky copyright laws in the EU, not as clear if it's in the public domain, so wasn't nearly as likely to catch on and become the symbol we all associate with COVID-19.

Filed Under: cdc, copyright, covid-19, illustration, public domain

What Do You Get When You Strip Patent Illustrations From All Context?

from the context-is-key dept

When filling out a patent application, the purpose is two-fold. The first purpose of the application is to provide enough information for the patent examiner to determine if your invention is original and non-obvious, thus patentable. The second purpose of the application is to provide enough information for someone skilled in the art the invention falls under to recreate the invention. Often to fulfill these two purposes it is necessary to include illustrations to help visualize key parts that may be difficult to explain solely in writing. Yet, what happens when you strip these images out of the application and look at them without any context at all? Would you be able to discern just from the image what the patent is? Via io9, we learn of a Tumblr account that takes this idea of context free patent illustrations and runs with it.

Let's take a look at a few of these illustrations and see just what each might be:



Either Ian Bogost has been granted a patent for clicking a cow on the internet or someone has patented the sirloin steak.



It looks like someone has invented a new method for dispensing cats for adoption via a very large crane game. Not sure how happy the cats will be when adopted, but the game sure looks fun.

While I have often wondered why my 6 year-old's crayon drawings need copyright, I can tell by these next couple of illustrations that even without copyright she could make quite the living drawing illustrations for patent applications.





I can honestly say, my daughter's art is way better.



Who would have thought that people might want to wear shoes while wrestling? I know I certainly wouldn't have conceived of the idea had it not been for this patent application.



Ooh. Looks like someone has been awarded a patent on modern copyright maximalist strategy. The mine cart represents the one track mind of those seeking more enforcement legislation. The Whac-a-Mole represents how effective those measures are in real life. I like it.

While I feel that illustrations can be invaluable to a properly filed application, especially for those seeking to use those applications when the patents expire, one must really look at these sample illustrations and many of the others posted in the Tumblr blog and wonder, "Are these illustrations really helping to promote the progress?"

Filed Under: illustration, innovation