You get an e-mail from a marketing agency representing a product you use on a regular basis. They “love your work,” so they want to “share” it along with other product “enthusiasts” on a new “social marketing” website they’ve developed. They offer you a credit and a link.

Sounds good, right? Free publicity from a company whose products you already use?

Wrong. Check out the draconian user agreement they’ve attached:

see it bigger

Sorry, ______: I’ll still use your products, but I don’t sign the rights to my work and my face away without a big fat check. You want to feature my work on your blog? Ask for a Creative Commons commercial license, and then maybe we’ll talk. (See below)

Tiger Woods doesn’t endorse Nikes for free, so why should artists endorse art supplies for free?

Don’t let some corporation take advantage of you under the disguise of “social networking.”

UPDATE (6/15/2009): Google recently asked a group of well-known illustrators to submit art to be featured in their new web browser. The compensation? Exposure. Some good links:

NYTimes: Use Their Work Free? Some Artists Say No to Google

“You’d think that if anyone can afford to pay artists and designers it would be a company that is making millions of dollars,” Mr. Ciardiello said in an interview.

In the first quarter of this year alone, Google reported profits of $1.42 billion, an increase of 8 percent over the same period last year.

In a statement responding to questions, Google said that the project was modeled after a similar one last year for iGoogle, a personalized home page, where artists and companies (including Jeff Koons, Bob Dylan and Gucci) contributed images to be used as skins.

“While we don’t typically offer monetary compensation for these projects,” the statement said, “through the positive feedback that we have heard thus far we believe these projects provide a unique and exciting opportunity for artists to display their work in front of millions of people.”

But exposure often is a given for illustrators, who are rankled that Google is asking them to work for exposure alone.

“I have done gift cards for Target that are in stores nationwide and animations for Nickelodeon that run 24 hours a day worldwide on cable TV,” Melinda Beck, an illustrator who is based in Brooklyn, wrote in an e-mail message to Google rejecting its offer. “Both of these jobs were high-profile and gave my work great exposure but both clients still paid me.”

Mike Lynch: “Don’t Work For Exposure”

Keep moving — especially when a corporate giant like Google, that as we all know pays a decent wage to many of its employees like programmers, executives, media consultants, secretaries, etc., asks for your hard work for free.

No idea whether I plagiarized this or not. If not, we might have to make t-shirts…

A napkin doodle for our financial crisis. This was is my old man’s approach to money, and thank goodness he passed it on to me.

This is an engraving by William Blake called “The Laocoon as Jehovah with Satan and Adam.” It was done around 1820, but to me, it looks like it could be a graphic for yesterday’s New York Times magazine.

The graffitti scrawl on this is really nutty: Blake is spouting off a manifesto about Christianity and art:

A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect, the Man
Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian
You must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art

A little extreme for my tastes. I think that pretty much all that stuff is more important than art. (That’s probably why nobody will be reading my comics in 200 years…) And what about weddings? He goes on to say, “For every Pleasure Money Is Useless.” Tell that to the cake baker!

Maybe it’s the huge bags of currency we’re throwing into the celebration fire for this wedding, maybe it’s the Christmas season, or maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been reading Dickens’ Christmas Carol in bed, but I’ve been thinking about money.

Jesus said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God!” (Luke 18:24) I guess that means that you should give everything away. Eat, drink, and be merry. Ebenezer’s life sure got better when he started burning through his savings…

And what about charity? What is our motivation for giving to others in need? It’s not necessarily the promise of getting into heaven. Dig this excerpt from an Nytimes article by Peter Singer, “What Should a Billionaire Give — and What Should You?”

Interestingly, neither [Bill] Gates nor [Warren] Buffett seems motivated by the possibility of being rewarded in heaven for his good deeds on earth. Gates told a Time interviewer, “There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning�? than going to church. Put them together with Andrew Carnegie, famous for his freethinking, and three of the four greatest American philanthropists have been atheists or agnostics. (The exception is John D. Rockefeller.) In a country in which 96 percent of the population say they believe in a supreme being, that’s a striking fact.