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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."
First off, fashion occupies a unique niche in culture and purchasing decisions. As noted http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/597on a relevent blog "The fashion industry profits by setting trends in clothing, and then inducing consumers to follow those trends. This process leads us to treat clothing as a status-conferring good to be replaced once the fashion changes, rather than as a durable good to be replaced only when all the buttons fall off. Trend-driven consumption is good for the fashion industry, because it sells more clothing. " That nature is hardly applicable to software, literature, film, or design.
The New York times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/us/04fashion.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=allran a story that included this telling quote, "“If I see something on Style.com, all I have to do is e-mail the picture to my factory and say, ‘I want something similar, or a silhouette made just like this,’ ” Ms. Anand said. The factory, in Jaipur, India, can deliver stores a knockoff months before the designer version."
An NPR story http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1434815noted that "it's expensive and risky to actually create new designs. It's cheaper and easier to simply knock off successful ones."
The entire point of IP is to encourage social and cultural development through the protection of initial investment. The fashion industry demonstrates what happens when IP is weakened or non-existant - a disincentive to create and develop and a thriving copy-culture.
It's already got extremely strong IP protection, enforced strongly by the police. The Intellectual Property in their case though is called trademarks.
If you are travelling from China into Paris with twenty Gucci-branded handbags, the police will slap you with a fine that's a lot bigger than the current "fines" for downloading software.
I loved the rationale that a recipe is "just a list of instructions and therefore not copyrightable". Maybe we should apply the same logic to software which is "just a list of instructions" and somehow therefore copyrightable? It does not compute... Personally, I have in the past 27 years of programming not once directly profited from copyright. The only software to which I've retained copyright is software that I wrote under the GPL, and all of the other software has been work for hire. Of the work for hire, not a single line of that code was ever sold! All of the code that was distributed as done so freely, usually to capture and audience or promote another product or event. Would it make any difference to me if software were not copyrightable? Hell Yes! I would have just as much programming to do, but I could re-use software I have already written. As it stands now, the only software I can reuse on each job is the code I wrote under that I placed under GPL! And it is because of that code, that I always have work that I have to turn down due to lack of time. So for some of us, the Fashion model is reality in software, just we end up knocking our own work off over and over again for different clients with different tastes.