This month, we asked our design panel to express their views on a subject that strikes an emotional chord with just about anyone who creates and sells intellectual property — the discovery that someone has appropriated, copied or interpreted your work and passed it off as their own. Writers are protected by copyright laws, but creative design can be a bit trickier. Barclay Butera’s reflection on the use of respected centuries-old symbols and concepts defines it in its most acceptable form. Rick Janecek discusses the extreme case — the blatant stealing of another company or designer’s product for mass reproduction — and suggests it as a hot topic for… Oprah.
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Doug Wilson |
It has become a worldwide problem. Designers all over the globe are experiencing considerable problems with the manufacturing and importation of cheap copies of their designs from countries such as China. There is no appreciation for the design process in this practice, only for the end product which is given over to the masses. This disregard for design as intellectual property leads to the appropriation of the product concept, and it should become a concern of consumers. Ultimately, they are the ones being cheated of lasting quality; not to mention it is also illegal. If quality doesn’t become a concern, then lawsuits will. Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but in the end it’s still a knockoff. — Doug Wilson
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Dorian Webb |
Copyright infringement is definitely a serious problem within our industry. Retailers who knowingly purchase knock-offs should shoulder some of the blame. Oftentimes, it is the smaller designers who invest in the development of new product only to have those designs stolen by larger industry players. They have the wherewithal to consolidate their costs, and to bring similar products to market more cheaply for retailers who like the look, but not the original price tag. Ultimately, it’s the customers who suffer and are disappointed by these low-cost look-alikes that offer a fraction of the quality of the original. — Dorian Webb
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Barclay Butera |
This issue frustrates me immensely. Design is an adaptation or interpretation of history. There are no original shapes, colors, forms, patterns or designs. Designers from hundreds of years ago created designs from centuries earlier.
The Greek Key design originated from ancient Greece and has been interpreted into rugs, trims and all sorts of textiles. Design is adapted from or inspired by heritage.
— Barclay Butera
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Rick Janecek |
This is a topic that I am very passionate about. When a retailer or a wholesaler copies the competitor’s product, no one wins. The company that does the original design spends a great deal of money to hire creative directors, designers, create molds and develop new technologies. The company that copies the original is stealing. The only way to sell a copy is to make it cheaper, which compromises quality. Ironically the copier usually has to sell the item at a lower margin making it difficult to be profitable. In the meantime the original design becomes so diluted that the item loses its appeal. I have found that people are becoming so desensitized to plagiarizing they don’t even realize what they are doing is stealing or that they are doing anything wrong. I know a lot of designers and buyers, who copy a design, change the color and convince themselves that they have designed the piece. Maybe we should have Oprah get a few people together. It seemed to have some effect on publishing — maybe she could do the same for the home furnishings industry. — Rick Janecek
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Lisa Nardone |
Whenever I see that it’s happened, it’s been so badly done that it doesn’t matter. Sure it irks me, but I’m always going to have another idea.
We’re all inspired by something, but as a designer, I take that inspiration to a different level. I have no respect for people who don’t use their own creativity to interpret it differently.
— Lisa Nardone
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Nina Campbell |
This is a growing issue beyond people just arriving at the same ideas simultaneously. Quite often, we are printing in the same places and weaving in the same places where there are limited colorways of thread, so things can end up looking similar. I think the key as a designer is to be very careful to document your inspirations and sources and the design process in case there are any issues. There are certainly more instances of a distinctive pattern that belongs to someone, cropping up in cheaper outlets. The trouble is that you have to be a large company to have the power to pull someone up for it and to fight it. — Nina Campbell
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David Landis |
It’s Big…. we are all influenced by our surroundings. Take it all in and spit it out, but it’s gotta be your own spin. — David Landis
February 6, 2007 at 12:19 am
My whole life revolves around an inspiration board of some kind whether in my head, mother nature, a great antique or right in front of me on the enormous cork wall in my office. Even tradeshows in general tend to inspire me, they inspire me to keep being creative and continue to strive for new and inovative direction. My inspiration at tradeshows in regards to design is to admire those who are still dacing to the beat of their own drums and congratulate those who do and encourage them to keep pushing the envelope. On the flip side of creative you have those who want to capitalize (for free )on what they have seen in our work and make it themselves… and the blessing is their knock off is usually very poor: off-balance, not to scale, and made of sub-quality materials. I have always heard the greatest form of flattery is imitation… it is also the greatest form of un-creativity!!!
February 16, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Design has to exist in the personal interpretation of all that has already been done. That designer’s interpretation has to be seen as valuable to the customer. After all, they drive this market. The intellectual process is some mystical realm that doesn’t really exist to most of the public. Education may be a solution and is certainly less messy than legal action. Design TV does help in this as it shows how we as designers take elements from the world that already exist and mix them with our own internalization of the world as seen through our personal and trained viewscopes. And yes, on occassion we do come up with a completely new idea or approach. We are the creative lens from which the world looks fresh and innovative. This is the magic which creates the value in our product as a creation. If you want a cheap China knock-off with no substance or true value, you get exactly what you pay for, a low-brow decorator fix with no true sence of “Design”. Feed that to the masses and let them choose. In the world we live today, every aspect of life is a choice between frozen pizza via factory line to refrigerator truck and gourmet cuisine crafted from specialized education and talent.
February 16, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Thanks for your comment Matthew; and on choosing between substance and value — I spoke with one of our design panel members, Paul Thompson, this week via phone while he was in Frankfurt, Germany for Ambiente. Paul said the show’s annual “Plagiarius” exhibit and awards were extremely powerful at bringing it all to light… the Ambiente trade literature describes the exhibit as: “Anyone who simply copies a product is guilty of stealing intellectual property. And right on their trail is the Plagiarius campaign (Aktion Plagiarius e.V.), which annually awards a negative prize – a gnome with a golden nose – for particularly brazen copies. The plagiarized and original products are to be seen at an impressive exhibition in the foyer of Hall 4.1. The trophy will be officially awarded on 9 February.” You can see the “winners” at: http://www.plagiarius.com/e_awards_plag2007_2.html Do you know if anything like this exists here in the U.S.?
February 18, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Susan,
Back from Frankfurt and glad to see your posting. I think that ART, Dallas Market Center, High Point or other organizations might look at this German direction to help support the fine artist and companies here in the U.S. that work with integrety to create products that inspire and grow business. Perhaps these exist, but I am personally not aware of such.
February 19, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Thanks, Paul. We published information on this some time back. Like you, I don’t think there is any organized effort in the US to curb this problem.
February 25, 2007 at 2:57 pm
I have had several designs knocked off over the years. I’ve been in many law suits, all the way to the 9th District Court of Appeals with a few big box stores. The IP laws do very little to protect the designer in most cases. However, it does protect our right to design. If the courts were able to come down harder on all infringers, there would be less room for new ideas. Where the law draws the line as to what is protected is in a good place, even though it has cost me dearly. I always settled out of court because the make up of the jury would almost always be filled with people that probably own knock off designs they purchased on the street right outside the court house in L.A. Until the public stops buying stolen designs, the courts will rarely protect the designer. The only reason I prevailed is because my designs were unique and the copies were exact.
And Barclay, you are just wrong. There are plenty of original ideas not coming from history. The defendants in my cases never could find any derivitive designs.
Matthew, I believe that the knock offs have become so good that the public has a harder time seeing the difference. The copies of my designs were almost impossible to tell from the ones I manufactured.
I won most of the cases, but ultimately I lost my manufacturing business and the 10k stores I sold to due to knock offs. Organized efforts in the U.S. to curb this trend would do very little. Change would only come if the knock offs cost more than the original.
February 26, 2007 at 7:55 am
Back in the 80s I was a knitwear designer. I trained up someone who then left the company and set up a business producing copies of my designs (not very good copies) We used to applique soft calfskin onto the knitwear and had an embroideress to do this for us. The copies were in hide and the stitching varied very slightly. I hired a barrister in London and took her to court. She was told not to produce any knitwear for 15 years and I had to pay all the costs because the copies varied very slightly from mine. I got her on passing herself off as me.
Since that day I vowed never to waste my time chasing people who rip off my designs. My time would have been better spent creating new designs and saving the money to invest in the business. My business closed due to the time I spent on the case and also the massive costs in doing so. Life is too short.
February 26, 2007 at 6:49 pm
If consumers don’t care and buy knock-offs all the time and fashion designers’ Oscar gowns are being knocked off overnight (and featured on TV for how clever it is), can we expect our industry to do much. What kind of response do you hear from retailers? Do they care?
February 27, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Sorry to say they mostly care about price. I had a few distributors that admitted they wanted my line but chose not to buy, and waited for the knock-offs they knew would soon appear.
February 27, 2007 at 5:39 pm
As said by others, This is not new!!, most manufacturers in most retail copy someone. Is it right? no, however trying to regulate it would be a nother can of worms. I am amazed at what I see at one market that was copied from the market before. The trick is to improve what has been done before.
February 27, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Retailers need to care about price as our customers are evaluating our entire product lines, comparing us to the “big boxes” and their price points which we independents can rarely match. But that doesn’t mean we don’t choose quality over knock-offs, it just means we have to be careful in our choices.
To keep it fresh we have to scour the Handmade sections of Gift Shows, go to ACC shows and regional markets and try to find artisans and smaller companies before their product or design is knocked off.
And remember, many of us specialty retailers design product, too, and know the problem first hand. I had a furniture line I’d designed that I was having manufactured in the Philippines and when it was delayed I flew to Manila to see what the hold up was. And the line was already being sold in the manufacturer’s showroom, which means when factoring in my time and expenses I could have bought my own product cheaper from a wholesale importer.
But you live and learn. Realizing early on that I may only get a season with even my own designs keeps me on the hunt for new ideas. They can’t copy me if I’ve moved on to something fresh.
February 28, 2007 at 2:20 am
Human nature, no, human benevolence seems – at least to me – a subject the minds of these men and women committing plagiarism are ultimately void of, if not avoided. The quality of plagiarised (a word I have found, through personal experience, to be shockingly reminiscent to ‘stolen’) product, nor its price or financial success, is really a factor in the looming wrongness of plagiarism; what may be skipped over in the discussion of plagiarism is its fracture on moral conduct.
Morality, however disputed, does not go hand in hand with the rules many have grown accustomed upon relying on. The laws, however important to adhere to, do not portray what is ultimately right or wrong; in fact, did our own government not legalize slavery? And wasn’t the consumption and distribution alcohol only recently prohibited? Laws come and laws go, they do not, in any case, create human goodness or good values, morals, or deeds. The irrelevance of plagiarism’s legality, therefore, is so very great that one cannot help but to be frightened over the ability of others to, like schoolchildren, use rules and the loopholes between them instead of their own thoughts and opinions to reason actions.
What, precisely, is the doer of plagiarism trying to achieve, trying to do, trying to prove? There is the obvious commercial upside, always in the presence of human consciousness, the greed that lurks at the back of our minds, but, if there is really no other motive, this leaves very little room for moral consciousness. To come home to a husband, wife, son, or daughter, and not to be able to express glee over an original product, but, instead, gloat over stolen goods; this is surely such a curse upon the mind of modern businesspeople, and, therefore, mine is in the state of involuntary pity.
February 28, 2007 at 4:14 pm
This retail store cares very much about the constant “knockoffs”. We shop the markets very diligently for QUALITY furniture and accessories. We are not a store that buys deep in the same accessories, but we buy very broad. We always like to be on the cutting edge with the new introductions.
What happens quite often is that we invest our time and money discovering these new treasures only to go back to market and find knockoffs sprouting up in various showrooms at a price considerably less. Granted they are not the top quality of their predecessors, but they are definitely recognizable. We do NOT buy them, but the problem we experience is that other stores (both large and small) in our area do.
None of us can be too secure to think that our customer are not shopping our competitors. They see the prices of these knockoffs and think we are ripping them off with the fair prices we have placed on the originals. Yes, we usually are successful in explaining the differences when we are ask, but God only knows how often we are not asked.