I really dig this TED talk from USC's Johanna Blakely about how the lack of copyright and patent protection for clothing design has accelerated the creative pace of the fashion industry, and I think she nails it when she points out that digital technologies have collapsed copyright law's traditional distinction between ideas and tangible expression. It's become so easy to create, copy, remix, and share that those definitions don't really apply anymore. On the other hand, I don't think simply doing away with IP protections entirely is the answer. (I'm a lawyer, after all.) While I'm not saying fashion is easy, I would argue that it's easier for fashion designers to iterate and differentiate, and that the harm done to Gucci by ripoff handbags is much less damaging than the harm done to an author or musician by someone who copies their work -- unlike the Gucci bag, the customers for original books and music often are the same people who buy the fakes, and not everyone will seek out the original.
What's more, I often find that arguments against IP protections are often made very idealistically, where competition, remix, and creativity only produce happy results, but sometimes things get stolen simply because it's easy and cheap to make money that way, and IP laws provide protection against that sad reality. The real question, in my mind, is how best to balance those protections against creative freedoms, not whether we're protecting ideas or expressions. Anyway, it's a great presentation that everyone should watch -- check it after the break.
posted May 26th 2010 6:53PM
Get rid of stupid copyright and massive fines.
@Maybach : Have copyright laws ever served actual content creators lately?
I agree with you mostly except, I a curious to 'hear' anyone's opinion on KIRF products. Isn't a KIRF iPhone the same thing as a knock-off Gucci handbag?
@greenestofteas Gucci are still doing just fine, though, aren't they?
@Maybach And Apple too.
@greenestofteas
No because those KIRF's aren't sold at your nearest Walmart.
@greenestofteas The iPhone name itself was "borrowed without permission", and the styling at the time was said to be "inspired" by the LG Prada.
Apple also insisted on trying to patent multi-touch, in spite of other multi-touch products already available ahead of the iPhone launch.
@pur
Even if they were, the KIRF and the actual product have wildly different
- price
- quality
- image (people will know it's a fake and you didn't buy the real thing)
And someone who has the money and desire to buy the real thing won't be tempted by the knockoff. People who can't afford the real thing may buy the knockoff though and then everyone is happy.
You bring a great point up....ever though about rewriting the current copyright laws yourself? lol
Seriously though, maybe you should..
I understand in protecting peoples works. But the insane fines they implement is where I draw the line. Look what the makers of that bomb squad movie are doing. The fine that theyre imposing, and the number of people they're going after, they're asking for 4 times the money in circulation in the united states at this moment.
http://www.getthebigpicture.net/blog/2010/5/13/hurt-locker-producers-going-after-movie-pirates.html
Because these Lindows computers aren't being sold at Walmart for $259 with single core processors pretending that it will work 6 months from now.
http://stopsoftwarepatents.org/
Nilay, glad to see you're thinking about this issue. Have you ever read Stephan Kinsella's Against Intellectual Property?
Read for free (of course): http://mises.org/books/against.pdf
@mogren I've definitely read it, but I obviously disagree with its premise -- I think creativity is much harder than Kinsella assumes, and I think trying to defuse free-rider issues with some type of IP law is perfectly appropriate.
@Nilay Patel No doubt you and Kinsella also come from very different places as far as political philosophy, so until you discover the libertarian deep inside of you there's probably no hope for abandoning support of IP :)
@mogren Homeboy, I read The Fountainhead when I was 12 years old, and I have a political science degree from the University of Chicago. I think I'm pretty familiar with free-market arguments! :)
An IP-free market is one with irredeemable free-riding issues -- if you spend a year writing a book and then someone else could simply sell copies of that book the second you published it without paying you, you would have no incentive to write that book. As far as I can tell, it's impossible to square a libertarian ethic with a market that doesn't respect strong ownership principles. I'm all ears if you have a counterargument, though.
@Nilay Patel
I don't see how that's relevant. You have a copyright on the text of the book, not a patent on the general plot.
Oh sorry, though we were still talking about patents not 0 IP which is IMHO a ridiculous, unworkable idea.
@Nilay Patel It is unfair to corner a party in extremes.
The Libertarian Party is for limitations on IP law, just as they are for limitations on government power, and are no more for complete anarchy than they are complete abolishment of patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
It is hard to argue that the party is not correct that current IP law often acts as government endorsed monopolies.
@Ducman69 You and I are in two different places, I think. You're talking big-L Libertarian Party, and I was talking little-l libertarianism -- specifically in response to someone stating that little-l libertarianism requires an anti-IP position.
Now, I'm not familiar with the IP positions of the big-L Libertarian Party, so I can't argue them, really. As I said in the post, I agree in general that our system should be reformulated in some ways.
@Nilay Patel Nilay, I think you've probably read this before, but if not it's definitely a must-read. I'd say Tim O'Reilly, while definitely not your run-of-the-mill author has plenty of authority and respect from both writers and publishers. Hope you get to see this if you haven't yet:
http://openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html
Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution
I'd like to point out, though, that people still pay for knock-off fashions, whereas digital duplications are often dessiminated without any cost to consumers, so they're consumption is going to be significantly higher.
The copyright is not to protect big companies from Kirf.
It is to enable a new entity (presumably small) to enter the market with new innovation without fear of big players simply copying the new idea
@Girish
Unfortunately, copyright is abused by those big guys to sue the hell out of anyone who does ANYTHING to "their" intellectual property.
I swear, one day all of our minds will be monitored and I'll be sued for thinking something that "belongs" to somebody else.
The gov. needs to stop doing the RIAA and MPAA's dirty work. I'm sick of the US always being dominated by companies, it gives the public little control over where they actually go - not good for the rest of the world, considering the US of A is the only true "superpower" single country.
@Widgetech Well the companies are the public in US. When the companies make money, the share holders and the employees make money. The scientists and developers working there make tons of money. They are all public.
The government should stay out of business and let the market take care of itself.
@Girish In an ideal world, that would be the case. However, history has shown otherwise. Take, for example, the 19th century robber barons--Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie. They made a living by keeping the government out of business because they had so much money to spend (essentially bribing Congressman, etc.) to keep it that way. When so much money is concentrated in so few hands, it is easy to manipulate industry/economy to kill other businesses and hurt the common person.Those who had stock in competing companies strong-armed into submission could have lost a ton of money.
To make a long description short, while these companies may technically be called "public", they are not necessarily working in the public's opinion. A completely free economy = growth, consolidation, power (extortion, etc.), and then artificially high prices. Not good.
@War Ensemble If History is what you want to examine then also examine what happens when government bureaucrats become too powerful - "Dictatorship".
Choice is :
1. money and power in the hands of industrialists who are just interested in their business
or
2. money and power in the hands of power lusting bureaucrats
@Girish
I think also tech is diff bc of the massive R&D costs compared to clothing...and other things I suppose
@Girish Are you really suggesting that the only alternative to a free market economy is a dictatorship?
@War Ensemble The basic principle is freedom. Everybody(including industrialists) should be free. Restricting freedom by any means is a form of dictatorship.
@Girish
Uh, no, but nice try.
Those corporations are NOT public - they are owned and controlled by the rich, no matter how much stockholders would like to think they have a say in what goes on there. The poor will NEVER have a say in what goes on in a company, but they CAN vote and they will ALWAYS have control (even if only a little in the US) over the government, that is unless they elect idiots who given all the control to the corporations in some idiotic attempt to give it to the public. Corporations and public are not the same thing. Corporations shouldn't be legal humans, either, but that is another matter entirely.
There are two types of freedom, FYI - economic and civil. I'm all for maximizing civil rights, but economic rights need to be restricted. I'm not saying that EVERY market needs to be de-privatized, but many do. Medicine, for example. It's not a company's job to keep me healthy, or make the drugs that keep me alive - and the "competition" that "results" (it makes no competition...) in this privatization doesn't make any more "innovation" - no matter what you think, sorry.
And ANY restriction of rights is NOT a dictatorship, only COMPLETE restriction of rights is a dictatorship. Get your facts straight, you right-wing idiot.
@Widgetech Hmm, when you say the "rich", who do you think they are. Weren't they just common public before they used their brilliant minds to make awesome products and become rich???
People like Larry Page and Sergey Brin were very much the common public and they didn't steal money or cheat anyone. They used their brilliance to become rich and we all bought their products (through advertising) in a fair deal which we willingly accepted.
Why should their freedom be restricted? If we are free to own a grocery store, a mechanic shop or a small time computer software company and sell whatever we want how ever we want. Why shouldn't brilliant people and rich people be free also?
Actually if you have no one copying you means you are not hot anymore, have you seen anyone carrying Kate Spade bags lately??? It was all the rage 10+ years ago, knockoffs were everywhere too. Now, you don't even see the real ones anymore. They should be happy someone is copying them.
@Tony Montana
How much software lasts a year though? Year old software = unsellable.
But what about Software in general? There is so much technicality and at the same time there is so much creativity in this industry and at the same time the product itself does not exist in the real world. This is such an insane question that I believe the sooner we get to the Star Trek's world of no money at all the better off we will be :) (Of course that is a joke, that is not happening EVER!!)
If they would just bring the fines down to what the value of the product stolen really is, people wouldn't hate the RIAA and MPAA so much. Make it a $200 flat rate federal fine (so that they couldn't just keep bringing up lawsuits against you) and $2 a song/$20 a movie. Still inflated above market value, but still an acceptable fine for doing something illegal. What other illegal action will result in a $200,000 fine if your name isn't Kwame Kilpatrick?
@Apocalyptic 0n3
at $2 a song/$20 a movie most pirates' collection wouldn't be that far off the 200 grand
I guess many of us have short memories when we easily say let the market take care of it's self and that the government should stay out. Numerous examples exist as to why some form of regulatory control is not only needed, but is our being the consumer only protection. Statement sounds nice but it's implication is very scary.
I don't think it works the same. I mean how much money, time, and effort goes to designing clothes? All you need is a sketch pad and some art supplies an idea and you are good to go.
developing software or doing r&d for hardware takes much more money on the front end then say Urban Outfitters uses designing their fall line up.
There needs to be some form of copyright in software and hardware in the tech industry so developers can break even and at least make some profit in order to continue creating software and doing r&d.
@Jdrm03 I think fashion designers would disagree with that opening statement.
@Jdrm03 I think fashion designers would disagree with that opening statement
@tomer
the profit margin for fashion industry is much larger than tech industry its not even funny... especially high end fashion. it takes 1 designer and perhaps 2 assistant, 2 coordinators, about a week to 'design' some piece of garment. i would love to see a 5 men team churn out a usable OS in the same amount of time, 52 times a year.
its like comparing oranges and apples. what works in fashion industry doesn't apply to other business.
@All of you: I just want to say this. I worked IT at a medium sized Canadian fashion retailer. It takes teams (literal teams) to make clothes.
They start with a bunch of research. That company spent thousands on clothes, shipping fabric swatches on from all over the globe and trips to every fashion show known to man. Once the research is done it is split into teams. One team tackled tops, one team tackled pants and one team tackled accesories. They spent nearly 4 months designing, changeing, and then designing some more. After all that they have a company meeting to decide what goes to market and what gets left concept.
Once they have a particular seasons line set, its handed over to marketing. They have to hire the model(s), they have to design the entire store (the headquarters had a literal test store in it), and then design all the marketing materials for it.
With one month to go it sent to the factories and all the advertsing is sent to stores. At the stores the staff are trained on how to sell the fashion and how to model it (yes they are supposed to wear it.)
Suffice to say it takes a boatload more than an artist with a pad to make a profitable clothing company. Now an artist could use sites like shirt woot to just design and go but so can a person creating code. Its all a matter of scale.
but how many man/hours does it take to make a piece of decent software? or a combination of OS and hardware? anything tech based these days takes a huge investment to get started, and even more to perfect.
compare that to the amount of time to 'design' a handbag, or a t-shirt, and you can see why copyright isn't a huge deal in fashion industry. the profit margin is so huge in fashion industry there its much easier to survive even if you take a hit from KIRFs.
The fashion industry is an interesting model, but in the TED lecture I didn't hear a lot about the downsides of the industry. For example, if we applied the same to technology, it would mean that we would have a few major powerhouses of technology dictating the trends/innovations, and an enormous plethora of lower-cost, lower quality knock-off's. As others have already said, wouldn't it end up creating a bunch of KIRF junk based on the iMac, Xbox 360, and iPhone. Sure, the tech industry as it is already has major players, but what keeps it innovative is that a small independent design house can come up with a great idea, and because that idea is protected, they can grow it into it's ultimate form. It seems like the fashion industry model might actually limit innovation to a smaller group of designers, while allowing a lot more low quality software and hardware onto the market. Sure, the dollar numbers would be higher in terms of dollars traded, but is that always a good thing? It's something economists never really can explain - bigger numbers are not always better.
@mikeydbrain at around the 14 minute mark Johanna makes the case for protected vs free(shared) and that in the digital age that it should not be JUST lawyers deciding these things.... like DRM.
the last few minutes is where she brings it all together with tech and DRM
I listened to this Ted Talk today and was impressed how IP is treated differently in diff countries and how the industry develops an immitation (KIRF) but still there is virtue to copying. And furthermore that the lack of copyright and all the fakes are fine and the major creators not only survive but make shit tons of money. Watch the clip people. Watch it
I think the main point is "how easy it's to copy a solution?"
To copy a dress design solution you need the right and costly materials, you need people with the right skills... to copy an algorithm you have to do CTRL-C and CTRL-V
Like most forms of IP, its about creating a balance between the cost to innovate and the reward for doing so, the later of which is a direct function of how easy the innovation is to replicate. In the fashion industry, there is arguabely a natural balance. In many other industries this isnt true.
Okay, I've been reading Engadget for a long time, but I've registered today just to set some perspective.
Her theory is not entirely right, and not entirely correct. Since I think I'm probably the only fashion designer from Engadget's readership, I'll chip in.
I'll take a modern smart phone as an example. There are numerous manufacturers of mobile devices now, and they produce a good amount of different models of phones each. Yet for most of the time, switched off, they look pretty much the same. It's a plastic/alu bar, with some standard buttons on and a screen, an earpiece, a microphone, and a camera. They all have home buttons, some have additional buttons, they all have camera lens at the back, all have the screen and look pretty much alike if not discussing the details - iPhone, HTC phones, LG and Motorola phones, they're all bars with screens and a bit of buttons.
So basically, that's the way fashion industry looks at things, e.g. these are all different jackets, from different fabrics, with different details and cut, but essentially, they are the same form & function more or less (excluding some conceptual design).
So in that sense, these IS NO DIFFERENCE between the logic of, say IT industry here, and fashion industry. Therefore her argument has little point.
Our screens are all rectangles with glass, our phones are bars, our earpieces are... earpieces, our printers are boxes with paper in them, our scanners our flatbeds with glass on top, our cameras are little rectangles with buttons and lenses, pretty much EVERYTHING is more or less "inspired" by other designs, or actually, by the heritage of electronics.
The devil, however, is in the details. How exactly things operate, how exactly they function. This is what makes the difference. And in that respect, fashion industry is actually the same - we patent textile innovations, textile treatments, create new fibers, new materials. Best well-known examples would be DuPont, Gore-Tex and Lycra. If you buy a pair of socks that has Lycra in them, the manufacturer paid fees to use it those socks. If there are treatments that make textile fireproof/waterproof/odor proof - someone has a patent o it. And even non-utilitarian textile, like fabrics that Issey Miyake develops in his fashion house and uses, his famous pleats - those are trademarks.
So I hope that clears things up a bit. Also, she's way too annoying and positive about high street knock-offs. There is an upside, of course, but there are also numerous and serious downsides, which I am not going to elaborate upon, unless someone is really interested. Sufficient to say, she doesn't know squat about what she's talking about, and all the research that she's put into this presentation was probably done on an evening before, while readying to go to bed.
PS. Ingus, be a darling, and stop talking. You clearly don't know what you're talking about. If your POS cargo trousers made by Indian children for $1 were put together by 1 designer, 2 assistants and 2 coordinators, that doesn't mean that this is how it's supposed to be made. It's like saying "OMG DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY RESOURCES YOU NEED TO CREATE A FART APP FOR APPSTORE??!!". So don't embarrass yourself, keep quiet.
PPS. Engadget team, it's really cool that you've start this Alt project, makes Engadget stand head above the rest tech blogs and brings some wider audience, themes and questions to the table. Well done.