Johanna Blakley
Media | Entertainment | FashionArchive for copyright
Design Patents & the Future of Fashion
I had to attend the Struktur conference vicariously this year, but I had the great fortune of attending this creative summit for active, outdoor and urban design last year. The organizers had approached me because of my TED.com talk on the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry. It turned out that the active wear industry was facing a potential sea change. The news was getting out that Lululemon was aggressively pursuing design patents for their designs, effectively installing barbed wire around previous open pasture in the design community. The Struktur community wanted to know: what the hell is a design patent, anyway, and should I be getting some of them, too?
Once I knew this, It took me about zero seconds to agree to give a talk on the topic (here’s the video). I’ve been impatiently monitoring the wearable technology sector for many years now, where I see a very exciting (and lucrative) future for apparel designers. One key reason: fashion designers may not have copyright protection – which means they don’t own their designs – but they are eligible for patent protection if they can inject some unique utility into their design.
I can’t believe how long it’s taken for high-end fashion designers to get into the wearable tech game. But slowly and surely, it’s finally happening. The wearable-electronics market reached $8 billion in sales in 2014, and is expected to hit $20 billion by 2017, according to research firm Futuresource Consulting. I expect the sector to explode once customers realize that they should be getting tremendous utility value with their clothes – not just cute looks.
Editorial about wearable tech tends to be pretty snarky, but even cynical reporters are starting to warm to the idea. Athos now offers workout capris that alert you to your workout targets and tell you whether you’re favoring one leg over the other, which can lead to injury and inadequate work outs.
Emel + Aris have created a luscious cashmere wrap that’s actually a toasty electric blanket. Iris Apfel, icon of all who hope to age in grand style, has developed WiseWear cuffs that can send a message to an emergency contact if you should get in trouble. And while I’m no fan of Ralph Lauren, the Ricky bag is kind of genius, with its built in phone charger and LED lights that switch on when you open the bag.
So all of these contraptions are eligible for utility patents, which cover inventions that are novel, useful and non-obvious. So what is a design patent? Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve Been Upworthied!
I just found out my TED.com talk on fashion and copyright was deemed Upworthy. As you probably know, Upworthy is a crafty outfit that goes to great lengths to increase viewership of video content that serves some kind of socially progressive purpose. Part of their process includes generating multiple potential headlines and photos, and testing the different combinations on different platforms to see which combos attract the most views.
Of course it’s fascinating to me to see what they decided worked best for my video:
I must say, it never occurred to me that my argument was something “hippies” would love, but there ya go!
I’ve been following Upworthy’s progress for the last two and half years, and I was especially excited to hear about how they are developing new metrics for assessing how people are engaging with the media they’re promoting. Uniques? Nah. Time on site? Nope! Their latest focus? Attention Minutes, which they define here:
Attention Minutes measures everything from video player signals about whether a video is currently playing to a user’s mouse movements to which browser tab is currently open — all to determine whether the user is still engaged. The result is a fine-grained and unforgiving metric that tells us whether people are really engaged with our content or have moved on to the next thing.
At the Norman Lear Center, where I’m managing director, we have been studying the “Attention Economy” for several years, and now with our Media Impact Project, we have the opportunity to develop tools that accurately measure human attention. Needless to say, there’s a great deal of debate about how this might be done and so we invited several experts in the field — including Daniel Mintz from Upworthy — to debate the topic on our new website, The Fray. Launched with a skeptical piece by Richard Tofel from ProPublica, we solicited responses from ChartBeat, LunaMetrics, the Financial Times, Parse.ly and Columbia University.
This is not a debate that’s going to be settled any time soon, but I sure hope I find out whether my little video turns out to be must-see-TV for hippies.
Imagining the Future of 3D Printing at Fractal
Ever since I started doing research on fashion design and copyright, I’ve been tracking the progress of 3D printing technology. The disruptive possibilities of this technology are abundantly clear in the fashion sector, and so I was thrilled to receive an invitation to attend fractal, a very unique conference in Medellin Colombia, where a diverse group of experts was asked to facilitate conversations about 3D printing, synthetic biology and other bleeding edge topics.
Hoping to shake-up the typical conference format, the instigators behind fractal – the intrepid Viviana Trujillo and Hernan Ortiz – decided to invite the audience to use “design fiction” to spin stories of the future that would reveal the key social, cultural, political and ethical quandaries that accompany the adoption of new technologies. The facilitators were a fascinating group: Reshma Shetty , an MIT-trained synthetic biologist; acclaimed artist and director Keiichi Matsuda, whose augmented reality installations have been featured at MOMA and the V&A, and Paul Graham Raven, a speculative fiction practitioner who uses narrative to solve engineering problems in the UK.
In addition to telling stories about how homes might be made out of living things and how augmented reality applications will fundamentally change the contours of our self-presentation to the world, we tackled the topic of 3D printing. Read the rest of this entry »
When Traditions Become Trends
Yesterday, I joined “Project Runway” finalist Korto Momolu on an episode of “The Stream,” an innovative multimedia show on al Jazeera English. The topic? Cultural appropriation. Turns out that Momolu has gotten a lot of heat for incorporating African designs and textiles into her work . . . despite the fact that she’s from Liberia. I was part of the mix in order to clarify some of the ownership rules around cultural remix practices in fashion.
Cultural Appropriation in Fashion
When I talk about copyright and fashion outside of the United States, I often get questions about the dangers of cultural appropriation. Shouldn’t it be illegal for Western fashion designers to steal traditional designs from Native American tribes or to appropriate design features from traditional Ethiopian garb?
My research on fashion and intellectual property has focused on the benefits – both to consumers and to the fashion business – of the lack of ownership of designs. Fashion is actually one of several industries that treat their creative output as a commons – shared resources that can be freely reused, recreated and recombined.
This is often music to the ears of free culture activists, libertarians and lots of people in the digital media industries, who have seen first-hand how difficult (and often counter-productive) it is to enforce copyright protections on creative work that can be copied perfectly with one click.
But for people who are concerned about cultural imperialism, this “free culture” sounds like just another opportunity to take advantage of the little guy. Read the rest of this entry »
Order vs. Chaos on the Internet
Great illustration by Stephen Doyle
The May issue of Vanity Fair features a great article about the “War for the Internet,” or, more precisely, the battles over Internet privacy, piracy and security. I found myself in alignment with the group of guys that VF calls the “forces of Organized Chaos,” including Vint Cerf, Jeff Moss, Joshua Corman and Dan Kaminsky. The article’s filled with quotable gems (e.g., “Anonymous is more like a brand or a franchise,”) but here’s a nice sum-up of the “Organized Chaos” vision for the future of the Internet:
…the forces of Organized Chaos, by and large, think that the Internet should be allowed to evolve on its own, the way human societies always have. The forces of Organized Chaos have a pretty good sense of how it will evolve, at least in the short term. The Internet will stratify, as cities did long ago. There will be the mass Internet we already know—a teeming bazaar of artists and merchants and thinkers as well as pickpockets and hucksters and whores. It is a place anyone can enter, anonymously or not, and for free. Travel at your own risk! But anyone who wishes can decide to leave this bazaar for the security of the bank or the government office—or, if you have enough money, the limousine, the Sky Club, the platinum concierge. You will always have to give something up. If you want utter and absolute privacy, you will have to pay for it—or know the right people, who will give you access to their hidden darknets. For some services, you may decide to trade your privacy and anonymity for security. Depending on circumstance and desire, people will range among these worlds.
In this context, structuring the Internet around authentication systems that make it impossible for anyone to remain anonymous seems as foolhardy as insisting upon only non-commercial usage of the Web (and, yes, I’ve heard serious people seriously suggest this.) Finding the right balance between order and chaos on the Web is the era-defining challenge we face right now.
Hypocrisy in Hollywood
Created by: Paralegal.net
Big thanks to Peter Kim for alerting me to this great new infographic about Hollywood’s convoluted history with piracy and its battle to embrace and defang new technologies.
Louis Vuitton: Trademark Bully
I am delighted to have been invited to participate in a symposium about fashion and intellectual property law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School March 20. They’ve put together an excellent line-up, and I’m looking forward to discussing the many problems that I see with pending legislation that may grant copyright protection to fashion designs. (You can see some of my thoughts about this here, here, and here.)
If anyone affiliated with the symposium was wondering how the major fashion labels might enforce the new and unprecedented protections that the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act (ID3PA) would grant them, Louis Vuitton gave them their answer on Wednesday. In a condescending cease and desist letter, Michael Pantalony chastised Penn for misappropriating and modifying their trademarks in a promotional poster for the student-run event. Calling it an “egregious action” and a “serious willful infringement” that “knowingly dilutes the LV Trademarks,” Pantalony went on to say that the use would
mislead others into thinking that this type of unlawful activity is somehow ‘legal’ or constitutes ‘fair use’ because the Penn Intellectual property Group is sponsoring a seminar on fashion law and ‘must be experts.’
It doesn’t surprise me at all that an Associate Dean for Communications at the Law School quickly responded to the letter saying they would immediately stop using the posters and invitations: bullying cease and desist letters like this often work that way. When the General Counsel of the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Firestone, saw the letter, he had a very different response, citing several reasons why Pantalony’s claims were absurd.
Trademark protection is meant to protect consumers and companies like Louis Vuitton from imitators who hope to convince potential customers that their products were actually made by the famous brand. Quality control and brand reputation is crucial in the fashion industry and trademark protections are a perfectly logical way to protect customers from fraud and to give companies the tools they need to protect their valuable reputations. Firestone rightly argues that putting a parody of the Louis Vuitton logo on a poster for a student run event about issues surrounding intellectual property protection in the fashion industry would not constitute trademark infringement: obviously, the students are not selling a product of any kind that could be confused with a Louis Vuitton product. Harm done? None. And Pantalony’s additional claim, that people would be mislead into believing that Vuitton is a sponsor of the conference, was also dismissed by Firestone since all the conference sponsors logos are prominently listed on the poster (you can see the full poster here).
Thankfully, in this instance, the students had knowledgeable legal counsel to protect them. But, as you can imagine, that is not always the case. Just imagine the type of bullying that can take place if ID3PA passes: companies with deep pockets will have the ability to scare off lesser-known designers from creating any designs that seem substantially similar to theirs. Introducing design monopolies into the fashion business is a huge mistake that I hope our federal House Representatives will be canny enough to avoid.
Fashion in Rio de Janeiro
Exuberant colors and beach-ready style from Triya during Rio Fashion Week.
Just in case you haven’t noticed, Brazil is really hot right now. With its incandescent economy and its reputation for sensuality and Mardi Gras decadence, Rio de Janeiro, in particular, has attracted an unprecedented amount of global attention. As the sprawling city prepares for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, all eyes have turned to Rio to better understand how it ticks and how it might brace itself for the world stage.
When I was interviewed recently by Ronaldo Lemos for Brazilian MTV, he mentioned a new report that his research institute had issued about the growing Rio fashion industry. Territórios da Moda (Fashion Territories) is currently only available in Portuguese so, after trying my best to read it with Google translate, I asked Ronaldo and the project’s leader Pedro Augusto Pereira Francisco if they would answer some questions about their findings. They generously agreed and so this is Part One of a two-part interview about the inner workings of Rio’s booming fashion scene.
Johanna: I think most people are familiar with the bright colors and body-conscious style that’s typical of fashion in Rio, but you mention in your report a certain “hi-lo blasé” that defines the carioca lifestyle. Could you tell me a little more about that?
Ronaldo & Pedro: Sure, in our research we have identified three important segments in the Rio fashion industry. We have called them “fashion”, “off-fashion”, and the “atelier” circuits. The fashion circuit is the higher-end designers, the off-fashion is the incredible industry that developed in the outskirts of Rio, far from the posh neighborhoods. They are an important economic force, and have become also a creative force. And the ateliers are small-business, producing very exclusive pieces, and doing sometimes conceptual work, in a small scale. There is a lot of diversity in these segments, but they are all influenced to some extent by the image of Rio de Janeiro, that is, a casual-chic mixture, where flip-flops can be mixed with a very well-designed dress, and the combination ends up being a very sophisticated look.
Johanna: You indicate in the report that higher-end designers are less concerned with being copied than with being accused of copying, or getting caught on the back-end of a passing trend. In fact, I think one designer you interviewed said that they need to “escape trends” in order to remain relevant in the marketplace. Could you talk a little more about that?
Ronaldo & Pedro: Absolutely. The “fashion” segment is a fairly recent phenomenon in Brazil. The Rio de Janeiro fashion week (as well as Sao Paulo’s) only really took off in the last 12 years. So it is natural that designers find it important to establish their own identities and make a point that they are not simply copying the trends they saw in the previous shows in New York, London, Paris or Milan. In this sense, it is important to mention that seasons in Brazil are the opposite of what they are in the US and Europe. With that comes the temptation to simply copy the trends presented in the last seasons in the US and Europe. But the movement now is to establish a local identity, to strengthen the local brands and their ideas. There has been quite a lot of consolidation in the market in Brazil, and many local brands have been acquired by investment groups.
Johanna: It sounds like fashion designers in Rio have the option of registering their designs for industrial patents. However, they say it’s impractical to do so because of the cost and the speedy turn-over of product each season. Are designers upset that they don’t have more options to assert ownership control over their work?
Ronaldo & Pedro: Very few designers were upset that they were being copied and wished there existed more effective ways to protect their designs. That opinion is not the majority’s. Many designers realize that protection for the designs is impractical. Therefore, they believe it is very important to protect their trademarks, rather than worry if they are being copied or not. Especially in the atelier circuit, the copy is actually seen as a compliment, and many designers say they feel flattered that their pieces are being copied. Read the rest of this entry »
Johanna Blakley 