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The Fashion Industry As a Model For IP Reform
Scrameustache writes "In this 15-minute TED talk, Johanna Blakley addresses a subject alien to most here — fashion — but in a way sure to grab our attention. The lesson is about how the fashion industry's lack of copyright protection can teach other industries about what copyright means to innovation. And yes, she mentions open source software. There is one killer slide at 12:20 comparing the gross sales of low-IP-protection industries with those of films and books and music. If you want to know more, or if you prefer text, the Ready To Share project website should give you all the data you crave on the subject."
Well, clearly you didn't watch the video.
They have interview clips with the young, creative fashion designers. As one such designer said of the mall store rip-offs: "Well, the mall customers are not our customers. It doesn't really matter."
Or something to that effect.
She said (paraphrasing), "Open Source. Those people decided they wanted nothing to do with copyright."
She's a little bit wrong there when you consider that the GNU General Public License uses copyright as the vehicle through which the license is enforced. What she meant to say was that the free software movement requires people be able to copy and modify their software as part of the definition of software freedom. Not quite as good for a sound bite but a truer meaning for those who care.
TED talks might be "ideas worth spreading," but unfortunately Johanna Blakley is spreading nothing but half-truths and misconceptions about FOSS in her talk.
Don't get me wrong -- I have no impression that she's acting with malicious intent. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if she was supportive of the open source business model. But regardless of intent, her voice carries great weight when she's given the microphone at a TED talk.
11:50
"Open source software. These guys decided they didn't want copyright protection. They thought it'd be more innovative without it."
False. Some FOSS developers eschew some of the protections granted to them through copyright law and grant everyone very permissive licenses to their code. Other developers have used a clever hack to create a body of "copyleft" work -- code that can be used and expanded upon, contingent upon derivative works being distributed under the same terms as the original work.
Very few FOSS developers put their code into the public domain.
13:50
Around this point she shows a chart.
The chart has two axes:
X: "Property (Art)" -> "Free (Utility)" and
Y: "Physical Fixed Expression" -> "Idea/Digital Manifestation".
The left two quadrants are colored grey and have "COPYRIGHT PROTECTED" written above them. The right two quadrants and colored white and have "NOT COPYRIGHT PROTECTED" above them.
She plots "OPEN SOURCE CODE" on the chart exactly in between "Idea/Digital Manifestation" and "Free (Utility)", placing it on the right hand, "NOT COPYRIGHT PROTECTED" side of the chart.
At least for the moment, computer code is copyrightable in the US. And as I stated before, most FOSS code is copyright protected.
I think that Blakley has a lot of interesting ideas, and certainly knows more about the fashion industry than I, but she's needlessly negligent in her characterization of how FOSS interacts with copyright law.
Perhaps I should write her a polite letter...
coding is life
I'm the IT manager for a fashion company and as far as I can tell there is not much point in copy protection in our market.
A range lasts only 3 months (ie a 'season') so by the time something new is out and proven popular it's too late to copy it because we're already moving onto the next season.
Our designers build their labels by staying ahead of the curve, and our target market is 'cool' kids who don't settle for anything less than the latest. It's sort of self regulating.
Sure the Mall stores come out with clones of last years popular stuff, but people that buy that junk were never our target market to begin with.