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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."
I had a kneejerk thing to say here about software piracy, but then I realised that in my rush to be relevant, I hadn't RTFA and it was irrelevant.
Yes, I know, this is slashdot, I should GTFO with an attitude like this!
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
A not too wild guess is that this will probably remedied in the wrong way; by adding more IP protection to the fashion industry, rather than following their example.
you talk to any of the young, creative designers that are moving things forward, and they will tell you about how all of their designs are being ripped off by mall stores.
If I talked to such people, I'd firat ask which rules they used to prove their desings are completely original and the mall's are rip-offs.
In fashion, women are required to constantly buy new clothes lest they be considered "frumpy". Last year's clothes are perfectly good, quality-wise, but a culture has been created by which anyone who wears them is subject to public ridicule. The point of all this is to keep the fashion industry's pockets full. What kind of developer, oops I mean designer, doesn't enjoy working on new designs? They want everyone buying the latest greatest design, even if it's not as good as last year's.
Likewise in software, where upgrades are mandatory even though the current software works just fine. "But it's old tech!" the developer shouts at his utterly stupid users. "Why won't you upgrade? I really enjoyed working on this!" I recently asked a question on a support forum about Drupal. I didn't get my question answered, as the developers immediately discussed the fact I was using the "old tech" version (5) and the entire discussion became about when I was going to upgrade to the latest greatest version (7). Why should I? My software works just fine and customers are happy. Security upgrades are more like obscurity upgrades. "Because it's last year's fashion, daaahling"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
People copy fashions of high end items. Most people can't afford those anyway. They're too expensive. So no sales are lots.
Clothing is a physical good. If you can make one instance of it, you still need to repeat the whole manufacturing process to make more. This is not true of digital information.
The value of a good drops with the availability of the good. Digital information can be replicated infinitely. Clothing is much harder to replicate.
The value of clothing drops dramatically within 3 months because fashions are seasonal. So if you can replicate it after 1 year, no one cares. This is not true of software, movies, music, etc. A lot of IP retains its value for decades or longer.
And you might want to tone down that "Obviously you haven't heard of *obscure reference*." No, we haven't, and you could consider explaining it instead of telling us how whatever it is makes you sympathetic to megacorps enforcing IP laws. I doubt you'll get a lot of sympathy for that, although I'm sure that wasn't your goal, withering contempt for anyone who's not in "your industry" seemed to be the goal.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
And yet I wonder how many of those young independent designers would be in business for themselves if the big chains already held patent thickets to prevent emerging competition. I wonder how many of them would find they could only make a living if they worked directly for one of the big chains in such a world.
And I wonder how many of them would see the change as an improvement, if fashion patents were to be allowed.
You are absolutely right. I do find that hard to believe
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I didn't get my question answered, as the developers immediately discussed the fact I was using the "old tech" version (5) and the entire discussion became about when I was going to upgrade to the latest greatest version (7).
7 is still alpha. I wouldn't use that for production system. What's more, most modules are still unavailable for 7.
Heck, some useful modules are even unavailable for 6, such as views_ticker. Or are there any other tickers that show titles of nodes of a view? There are plenty which show all nodes of a certain type, or featuring certain taxonomy keywords, or from a hand-picked list, but no tickers based on a view. For that you have to stay with 5.
With drupal, you've got a good excuse for wearing last year's fashion: your favourite module or theme is still unavailable.
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
What free culture? This is an industry that has no qualms about charging thousands of dollars for a pretty piece of cloth!
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.
The speaker is getting her things mixed up.
Open source is copyrighted. And if it were not then people would copy without any regards. For example the GPL works BECAUSE of copyright. It uses copyright to keep free.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Fashion is about standing out, getting attention and signalling belonging to an elite clique. Items cannot be replicated infinitely. Because items are easy to create, many are created. Brand matters.
Computer software is about utility - does it work or not. Items can be replicated infinitely. Because items are difficult to create, very few are created. Brand does not matter.
With fashion, what you pay for is 1) the physical item itself, 2) the time that went into designing the item, 3) the prestige the creator has built for themselves.
With computer software, there is clearly no point in paying for the physical item itself, and no point in paying for any prestige either.
You could say that "if you could download clothes fully made there would still be an industry based around design" - true, but the example isn't transferable, because clothes, as mentioned above, are easy to create and many are created. If designing a dress cost $200m, and copies made of it were sold _marked with the same brand and in the same stores_, it would never be designed in the first place.
In fact, the important thing in fashion isn't about copyright protection, it's about trademark protection. Why does Armani sell? Because, although people can copy their style, they cannot copy their brand. It's trademark protection that is key to the profitability of the fashion industry - which she does NOT mention at all. Trademark is to fashion what copyright is to computers. Ask a designer how they would feel if trademark protection was removed, and you would see any "brand" they seek to create for themselves copied identically by mass producers. By pretending that the fashion industry thrives with no copyright protection, she fails to point out that their "intellectual property" is their TM, which they guard like hawks. This is deceptive. You go to jail for violating fashion trademarks. I would even argue that fashion trademarks are even stricter than computer copyrights.
Not to mention that to base projections about downloads on current download/sales ratios are deceptive - because if copyright violation was legal, companies would rapidly spring up, in the style of Steam, with a menu of software ready to pipe to home computers. Why pay for a movie in a store when you can have a library of every movie ever created instantly available only for the cost of bandwidth? With the current torrent system, at least a) your bandwidth may be limited, which market pressure would stop it from if copyright violation was legal; b) there are a few steps involved in burning the ISO; c) you will miss out on patches and downloadable content. If copyright violation was legal a Steam-like system would spring up in 2-3 months, with a well-managed system of circumventing copy protection. This would again lead to an explosion of even stricter anti-circumvention, probably involving hardware, which would add multiple layers of cost.
Why must KDawson be evil enough to put forward deceptive examples uncritically to serve his ideology? Can everyone else do the same thing? Or is being deceptive good as long as it serves the cause of good? It doesn't exactly inspire me to show much regard in return.
The TCP/IP stack isn't protected. Fail.
The difference between fashion and software (well, one of the many) is that software can be improved on iteratively.
And that improved version gets a NEW copyright, therefore the OLD one doesn't need it any more.
Even if your software is old, if it's solid and mature, people will want to built new shinies on top of its old reliable, and therefore, it was value to them.
Except with closed source (heck, even most Open Source but not FOSS), you CANNOT. Go update Windows 95 so it supports the new Atom subnotes.
Actually, the fashion industry's continued and persistent success proves two things:
1. That IP laws do NOT add incentive to create and it never has. It's a huge lie.
2. That when people copy freely that nobody can make any money. Once again, huge lie. As stated, it turns out that demographic plays a huge role in determining who buys what and for how much. "They are not our customers!"
They are indeed the model for copyright reform. They prove that an industry is in perpetual motion due to its lack of IP protection. The lack has done more to keep people busy and employed and even rich than any amount of protection could offer.
What IP protection offers is a way to slow down and control the evolution of design -- a way to way to invest less in R&D and design and still make money.
Thus just goes to prove how crappy the designs are if everyone is already sick of it after 3 months.
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.
It's trademark protection that is key to the profitability of the fashion industry - which she does NOT mention at all.
Actually, she does. More than once. Did you watch the video?
The point that she makes is that the ability to create derivative works fuels innovation, makes money, and fosters creativity, a point that I totally agree with.
Your assertion that "If designing a dress cost $200m, and copies made of it were sold _marked with the same brand and in the same stores_, it would never be designed in the first place." is specious.
Movies that cost $200M (and more, much more), are greenlighted all the time, bomb at the box office, die in the dustbins of discount DVDs, still don't recover their budgetary costs, and yet that doesn't stop more from being made. Does it?
Which leads to the question: Why do movies that cost millions to make generally suck the most?
Could it be that the old business models, dinosaurian management, and a sense of protected entitlement, foster a culture that recycles themes, prizes visual efx over story, stifles creativity and throttles risk taking?
Look at some of the most successful, highest grossing movies of the last 15 years and I think you'll see more that were made on relatively small budgets (Blair Witch Project being the poster child, but there are others) than you will Summer Blockbusters. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was turned down for production by all the major studios until Playtone picked it up, dropped it in the can for $5M and to date it's grossed $369M worldwide.
No, I'm with Johanna Blakely, less protectionism, less legislation, and less artificial control will foster change, evolution and creation, and that's something we should look forward to.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
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.
Seriously?
Comparing food, cars and clothing to films, books and music?
I don't know about you... but I kinda have this habit of eating every day, sometimes even more than once.
I also have this crazy need to change my clothes from time to time. Sometimes I even throw it away as I find it "unwearable", as it gets worn out OR my body changes from all that food I eat every day.
Compared to that, I am yet to throw away any of my DVDs, CDs, books etc. because it is "worn out" or "out of trend" or "I don't want to watch/listen to/read that at the moment".
And putting cars up there... Why not diamonds too? Or "space vacations"?
Come on... You can't compare a price of a car to the price of a lunch, or a pair of pants, or a CD.
Also, note the HUGE difference in the gross sales of the first two industries (food - which everyone buys all the time; cars - which cost much more per single item than the products of any other industry) and the rest of the "IP-freely" industries (fashion - items last a lot longer than food; furniture - lasts virtually forever).
Furniture is right there at the low end with the movies. Despite the fact that a decent bed (or even a cheap one) will set you back a lot more than a fun movie.
Also, virtues of copying?
Ohh... Just TRY incorporating the second two into ANY industry not based on shoe shopping.
"Induced obsolescence"? Really?
How would you like to have to re-buy ALL your software, books, movies, CDs EVERY SEASON instead of every time a new digital media appers?
Why would you have to buy it?
Because of "Acceleration in creative innovation", which translates to:
Fashionistas want to stay ahead of the curve.
They don't want to be wearing what everybody else is wearing and so they want to move on to the next trend as soon as possible.
EVERY SEASON these designers have to struggle to come up with the new fabulous idea that everybody's going to love.
And this [..] is very good for the bottom line.
In other words - snobbery supported by profit margin supported by snobbery.
Sure... you might say that we already have that in constantly changing "modern" music, artsy-fartsy films or even Apple.
But none of those "industries" can be pushed into fashion industry's "season based" product cycle.
Why?
Because fashion is the only "art" that can become OBSOLETE.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This question was specifically addressed in the talk. To dig deeper, maybe Microsoft doesn't need to spend billions annually on software development and R&D. It's very likely that Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple, Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Cisco, etc. are all spending billions doing more or less the same research. The first one who gets it basically invalidates the billions that all the others have spent, at least for 20 years. If Microsoft could just openly rip off, say, Apple, then maybe some of those billions they're spending on reinventing Apple's wheel could be spent improving Apple's wheel instead. Better yet, maybe Joe Kernelhacker could take the wheels that Microsoft, Oracle, Google, etc. have created, tweak it a bit, and come up with something that the rest could in turn incorporate, or that he could even sell and help share the wealth.
Also, look at, for example, Adobe's new feature in Photoshop whereby you can remove stuff from pictures just by painting a boundary around it, and it fills in the background. Now, I'll agree that you shouldn't be able to just copy the code directly from Photoshop and use it in your own application wholesale. But as the laws are set up now, you can't even implement your own version of this feature, and that's absolutely horrible for innovation. Hell, just look what's going on with the H.264 battle. Not only are some people saying you can't use that codec--by far, the most popular and well-supported codec on the Internet--to make your own videos without paying up to MPEG LA, but some have issued veiled threats that the whole process is patented down so heavily that making any software that can stream video at all will get you sued into oblivion. And they're probably right.
The point of that tangent is that without software patents and copyright laws being extremely relaxed, maybe Microsoft can take some of that money they spend on lawyers (a very significant amount, by the way) and divert it to R&D because they no longer have to worry about being sued and paying millions to some schmuck who, it turns out, has a patent on wiping their butts. (Not to mention the millions in royalties they're having to pay to the other schmuck who has the patent on using toilet paper.)
Also, the fact that Adobe has the first product on the market that can do the out-of-sight out-of-mind trick is great advertising. Without software patents, will everyone replicate this feature in their products? Eventually, of course, yes. It's a cool feature. But it's obviously something that's not easy to replicate. It's not like Microsoft can just go to their development gurus and say, "Make this happen." If they incorporated it into Paint, it would probably take them months or even years to figure out a way to replicate the effect, during which time Adobe will be selling copies of Photoshop like gangbusters. This was what she was referring to with the slide on making it hard to replicate.
Have you ever used a piece of software that was blazing fast at something? Unless it was open source, did you really know exactly how it was fast? Was it because they came up with some clever way to use less resources? Did they come up with some clever algorithm that churns the numbers faster than everyone else? Did they just work really hard to remove all the bloat from their code, or write it to use resources on your machine at a lower level? There are literally millions of ways to make something work better. I just don't think that IBM will be ripping stuff off left and right from Oracle because it's not like they're going to instantly just know what to rip off.
Obviously nobody has heard of "Forever 21."
Of course we haven't. WTF are you doing on slashdot? We're nerds. We don't give two shits about fashion. We don't care what it looks like, we care how well it's made and how well it works. We don't care what our jeans look like, we care about how comfortable they are and how much shit we can carry in the pockets.
You might as well troll a fashion messageboard with "obviously you've never heard of Emacs."
Free Martian Whores!
Fashion depends on churn. There aren't many original ideas. If you look at this year's runway fashion, and are familiar with the history of fashion, you can usually find a matching piece from decades ago. The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York has a large library of clothing against which new designs can be compared. This year, we have khaki (again), Gautier is trying green spandex shorts (80s aerobic wear), and Issey Miyake is over-pleating again (he did that better in the '80s) and using pink accents (so last year.) The jeans industry keeps fussing with various levels of fading, but they've been doing that for so long that nobody is paying much attention.
There's some technological progress, and it gets IP protection. Gore-Tex was patented, and for a long time, had a monopoly over waterproof fabrics that breathe well. Progress in materials, in sewing technology, and in cleaning has led to new ranges of clothing. Jeans, for example, depend on a sewing technology for strong corners that's only about fifty years old. (Today, rivets in jeans are decorative, not structural.) Sportswear, which was invented by Coco Chanel, wasn't really feasible before washing machines. Elastic fabrics opened up many new options. Not much new has come along in the last two decades, ("pleather" made a small splash) and fashion technology has somewhat stagnated.
As the TED talk points out, the big thing today is trademark protection via "designer labels". This is a relatively new concept. Until the late 1970s, no respectable garment maker would have the designer's mark visible, let alone a prominent feature of the design. Logos were associated with cheap T-shirts. The interlocking double C now associated with Chanel did not appear on Chanel products until the 1980s.
The apparel distribution pipeline is incredibly inefficient. Over 60% of apparel is eventually sold on sale. There's a hierarchy. First there's the initial sale, with a big markup. Then there's the sale rack at the original retailer, with the original tags still attached. Then there's the discount retailer who buys from the original retailer and resells from their own store. Finally, the unsold apparel is rolled into big balls about eight feet in diameter, which are rolled into shipping containers and shipped to third world countries for final sale, or recycled into nonwoven fabrics like cleaning cloths. There was an attempt during the dot-com era, called "Tradeweave", to create a secondary trading market in unsold apparel, but it only lasted from 1999-2001.
The watch industry is a branch of the fashion industry now. "We are not in the watch industry, we are are in the luxury industry" says the CEO of Rolex. They had the basic problem that their overpriced machinery is less accurate than a midrange quartz watch, and they now have the worse problem that people who grew up with cell phones see no need for watches. There have been attempts by the phone industry to do "designer cell phones", but so far, that's mostly a joke. Apple tried to position themselves as a high-end product, but you can now get an iPhone at WalMart for $97. Emulating the fashion industry hasn't worked for technology industries.