Marc Jacobs sued Christian Audigier for trade dress and trademark infringement.
NEED A LEGAL ACT FOR THE “ORIGNALS”? By Vy Nguyen
The lack of fashion copyright is said to play a major role in
“stimulating” innovation and benefit the industry overall, but as a designer it’s never easy to watch your own design being blatantly stolen without doing anything about it. Passing copyright for original design protection has always been a hot debate for several decades. Would the new law bring the end to the battle between the “original” and the “copycat” or it’s just a beginning of a major meltdown in fashion innovation? What is “Original”? Copyright law is made to avoid duplication, and something cannot be granted “duplication” if it’s not exactly the same, and exactly means 100%. Although most of the knock-offs appears to be pretty obvious in where the “Inspiration” come from, they are never completely the same. Something is going to be different: a button, a seam… To what degree a design is determined to violate intellectual properties from the “original design”? The answer is it’s almost impossible to figure out.
Another headache issue is how to define “Original”? Fashion is a repeating cycle. Nothing now is really a complete “original”. Take denim as an example, once upon a time flare bottom jeans was the hottest trend, then here comes the skinny jeans, then the flare comes back. A newborn design is most often inspired by what already been made before. The concept of “Original” is vague in the fashion industry.
Copyright Chaos According the current Copyright Act, since clothing is not all about art work, “It can’t obtain copyright protection aside from features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article.” It is a huge challenge for lawmaker to draw the line between which types of garments would be considered utilitarian and which one would be art. If the copyright protection for fashion design gets passed, many small designers are going to be out of business. Retailers such as Forever 21, H&M, Zara would be the first to be out of the game. The industry overall would suffer tremendously. How would top designers, who most are European, help the American fashion industry pick up economically? Take the issue at a different angle, if the original design is protected; only the top upper class in society, who makes up a very small percentage of the whole population, would wear innovative designs while everyone else wear pretty much the same style. How boring would that be?
their reputation by shopping at knock-off retailers. Secondly, it is a very rare chance that a broke college student would have bought the bag at Chanel instead if she did not see a similar looking one at Zara. The point is if they cannot afford it they would not buy it regardless. The consumer group who frequently shop at Zara most often would not shopped at Chanel. Some designers claim knock-offs items hurt their brand’s reputation. But again, it’s more of an assumption than a fact. There’s no obvious measurement for reputation’s damage when the high-end market target a completely different demographics. Another thought on designer market is that design the design easily goes out of style after a couple of seasons. The profit gained from each particular design does not last long. Innovation still has to keep going. It’s not the end of the world to not protecting a design that value is diminished quickly in the market place.
Knock-off market! Would it really hurt? The effect of knock-offs on the original designers is mainly about morality. Obviously it is never right to make money off something you don’t own, but to be truthful the knock-off market has very little effect on the high-end industry economically. It’s simply because their demographics are extremely different from each other. Up-scale designers’ main revenue comes from the wealthy class, who almost never want to hurt