Meng Sun
Rough Draft
Copy Right Law in Fashion
In this modern society, laws are everywhere to protect our daily lives. However, leakages still existed between laws, one of the most contradictory law is the copyright law. Especially in fashion industry where trends change comparably fast, designers sometimes could get lack of inspirations and may look at others’ works. Sometimes the boundary between “inspiration” and “copy” is really vague. Is there a way to define ownership in fashion industry? This paper discusses why fast fashion brands like ZARA take no responsibility for plagiarism and appropriated trends started by independent designers. Copyright law is designed to protect literary and artistic works was well as innovation such
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ZARA wins the customers because of its fast prediction on what customers like and quick supplies on fashion pieces according to the needs of customers. During my research in ZARA stores, ZARA comes up with new collection every two weeks and each new collections contains different kinds of styles various from easy street wear to mature workplace looks. Unlike most of the high-ends brands which comes up with a new collection each season and each collection has a harmony flows that connect pieces into one style, ZARA wins most of its customers by its fast speed of collection development and varsity domains of designs. Among all the designs, some look familiar and comparably similar to independent designers’ work. The left picture is from ZARA’s collection in March 2017 and the right one is from Balenciaga’s new collection. The sneakers looks almost the same from outside. Both of the shoes are trainer with white textured sole. It is not hard to find other designs that have a appearance of plagiarism in ZARA’s store. According to the interview with customers who shop at ZARA often, the plagiarism does not affect their preferences to ZARA since they appreciate the fact that they can buy the same design in a lower price. Also, in the Balenciaga case, the original sneaker sold out immediately after they came out and many people who can not wait for the pre-order choose to buy the
Intellectual Property law manages the guidelines for securing and authorizing legitimate rights to developments, outlines, and imaginative works. Pretty much as the law secures responsibility for property and land, so too does it ensure the restrictive control of elusive resources. The reason for these laws is to give a motivator for individuals to create inventive works that advantage society, by guaranteeing they can benefit from their works without apprehension of misappropriation by others.
In her 2010 TED talk, titled “Lessons from fashion’s free culture”, Johanna Blakely describes how the fashion industry’s lack of copyright and patent protection has allowed it to thrive in the economic market. This is mainly because designers have been able to recycle the same building blocks of fashion to create innovate, utilitarian designs into what we regard as art to adorn ourselves. In this talk, she urges other creative industries to adopt this concept.
Longer copyright terms can prove beneficial for large mass media companies as evidenced by The Walt Disney Company’s lobbying for the Copyright Term Extension Act. This act, often dubbed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, extended copyright protection for an additional twenty years in 1998. Consequently, Mickey Mouse is now set to enter the public domain on January 1, 2024. Disney will once again have the opportunity to lobby for extension and evade Mickey’s copyright expiration, thus preventing its most iconic character from entering the public domain. This holds pressing significance because lobbying for further extension legislation would likely occur within the next few years.
Copyrights are more limited in scope than patents. They protect the original works of authorship, not the ideas they contain. In the United States, original works include literary, drama, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. A computer program, for example, is considered a literary work and is protected by copyright. A copyright gives its owner the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the material or perform or display it publicly. However, copyright law does permit limited reproduction of copyrighted works without the owner 's permission for “fair use” such as criticism, teaching, and news reporting. In the United States, a published work must have a copyright notice, the name
Copyright is any expression recorded in any physical form, published or unpublished in any medium whether it is music, books, artworks or newspaper articles. Federal publications, facts and ideas are not copyrighted (www.honolulu.hawaii.edu). The very first copyright law that was established was known as the Statute of Anne, which was authorized in England in 1710 (history of copyright, 2005). The newly founded constitution allowed secure rights to its creators. An act very similar to the Statute of Anne was passed by congress in 1790 as the first American copyright law (history of copyright, 2005). As more and more books were produced and were becoming more accessible domestically and internationally in Europe and North America, it became
Copyright is the legal right, to an inventor to perform, print, publish, film, or record artistic, literary, or musical material, and to allow others to do the same. Copyright law was developed to provide the creators and inventors of any works with powerful and effective rights of exclusivity over their creations (Patterson & Lindberg, 1991). Over the past, these rights were almost unlimited. People would use existing developments as if they were their own without any regard of the creator’s exclusive rights. The need to balance and limit such rights arose, and governments established these limits for the general good of the public.
1: A copyright is a form of protection given to authors or creators of “original works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic and other intellectual works.
Copyright is legal protection for creators of original works, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, audiovisual, and other intellectual works. With the exceptions listed below, copyright holders have the only right (and the only right to authorize others) to do the following: to reproduce the work; to make derivative works; to distribute copies of the work; to perform the work; and to display the work publicly. Mere ownership of a book, illustration, photograph or negative, videotape, or musical work does NOT give the possessor the copyright.
Copyright protects the rights of any creator of content by giving them the legal power to do with their works as they choose. Once an original work has been created the owner then has the exclusive rights to sell, make copies, make other works based upon it, or place it on public display. (note: the work may belong to the
To those who are not familiar with the processes within the fashion industry, this world of style is characterized by a peaceful coexistence between all the stakeholders. To those in the know however, this is far from the truth with the fashion industry. The value of the United Kingdom fashion industry is large contributing to about 20 billion pounds into the country’s economy on an annual basis. To have a better understanding, the contribution made by the fashion industry to the country’s Gross Domestic Product is almost twice that being brought in by car manufacturers which is valued at 10.1 billion so fashion is no doubt a major business and clothing designs one of the core assets. In considering this, it is therefore a surprise that businesses that are operating within this industry within this industry are not given the opportunity to do more to protect the designs that they have. This paper puts forward the assertion that based on the case law of J Choo(Jersey) Limited v Towerstone Limited and Others, the system of intellectual property protection available in United Kingdom law is not fit for use in the fashion industry in its present condition.
The basic strategy for fighting competition is to attract buyers at lower prices, more unique designs, high-quality design, efficient customer service and solid image brand. Thus bargaining power of buyer for apparel industry is high as the products falls under the basic needs in human lives. There is no much difference in terms of products offered by the apparel company, so if buyer is unhappy with the product or service they can easily switch to another brand. Thus, Zara are trying to strengthen its position in the market by using their unique strategy by giving priority to buyer to meet their special needs.
In society is such opinion about prices, if the product price is low, it means that the quality is low. People think that everything with high prices has high quality, but it is not true. In this case Zara did not want to be seen as a low quality brand. Hence they create products of high quality. They wanted to be first between fashion brands and add new designs to their collections twice a week. For customers is not good to look the same designs two week, the company knows about customers needs and they remove the products that do not sell well and changes the stores’ organization twice a week. Products can be different by their functional aspects, by the price and the quality. Zara differentiates by these elements. The main point of the differentiation strategy for Zara is combination of the low price and high quality and if other companies want to be desirable, they must do the same. Zara tries to decrease the product in the inventory and increase the number of variable
One of the biggest driving forces in the fashion industry nowadays is the continuous introduction of new trends and the opportunity for designers to display their creativity. So, when that individuality is stolen or copied from a designer, it can produce uneasy consequences. Known as “design piracy”, this widespread reproduction of designs has actually been around for decades. Not much has been done at a federal level to prevent the moral and economic repercussions that stem from it. However, despite the fact that designers lose both independent recognition and profit for their work, in the long run, fashion piracy actually helps grow the industry by swiftly moving styles through society to make way for the next line of innovative
Copyright protection extends to expressions and not to ideas . Originality is the threshold standard of requirement of copyright. The case Walter v Lane [1900] AC 539 expounded the three essential elements (labour, skill and judgment ) of originality. The court adapted to sweat of brow test with no element of creativity require to make the work original. Copyright can be granted if a work is created through the effort of an individual despite the work containing statement of facts and no creative input by an author.
This paper analyzes the conflicts between the need of technology for creativity and innovation versus the legal aspect of copyright.