A few years ago, our R&D director Davy Loots came up with a creative viral. He rolled out 20cm of a roll-up meter, arranged a bit of snow on his kitchen table next to the meter and took a picture of it. This was sent out under the subject "look, there's 20cm of snow here in Belgium!". Email recepients expected to see a Belgian landscape covered in heavy snowfall (which rarely happens). Instead, they saw the 20cm of snow laying on the kitchen table.
A lot of people forwarded this viral. They even Photoshopped away the website url the viral was promoting. Since the image wasn't watermarked, you can still find it on google.
This year Davy used his original idea to make a zero-budget funny New Year wishes card for all of our Mobile Vikings contacts. Sadly enough, some people assumed the image was a rip off, since they already had seen it before.
If people would know that they are allowed to copy an image just as long as they retain the reference to the original author, this would never have been a problem. But since the record and movie industry is not interested in allowing people to copy a work of art, nobody is promoting creative commons licenses.
I feel like in another 10 years, artists will be their own distribution channel. New business models will promote copying of digitized artwork and they will be more beneficial to the artist then today's industry is. After all, why should an artist give 99,9% of commission to maintain a fat distribution pipe that adds no value for today's consumer?
Anyway: Happy New Year!
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