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.

Techdirt.