See the above image? That’s from Alienware’s website (Link) in which it is an embedded background. Alienware is owned by Dell Computer, a very big corporation. So big that every executive officer currently listed on the Yahoo Finance page makes a seven-figure salary. See the image below?

That’s from the website of some guy who most likely doesn’t make either a seven- or a six-figure salary. He’s just some guy creating 3D characters and showing them on his website (Link).

Unfortunately, the only thing Dell/Alienware and Fred Bastide, the person who claims to have created that little character, apparently have in common is the image above which is being used to help sell computers, because according to his post on CGTalk (Link), his work was used without his knowledge and without payment. Having seen this happen before (especially on videocard packaging coming out of Asia), I’m inclined to believe him.

But, hey, that’s okay. We live in a remix culture now, don’t we? This is just part of the “free culture” movement, isn’t it? It’s part of the “let 1% create it and allow the other 99% to appropriate it”, right? This is the flip side of Pirate Bay’s philosophy (if you can call making a ton of advertising revenue leveraging pirated music and movies as a lure for visitors a philosophy; you can read more about them in an earlier post – reLink).

{Image worth protecting is Copyright © 2006 Texwelt.net}