Genuine Design

Lawrence Chabra - Third Place Winner

Dear Senator Schumer,

First, I would like to say that I heartily support the steps being taken by your office and the U.S. legislature to extend the copyright protections to the fashion industry through the Design Piracy Prohibition Act.

As a student about to enter the interior design profession, I want to urge you to consider extending these same copyright protections to the furniture design industry as well. Extending these protections is essential to ensuring fairness and justice in the marketplace as well as ensuring the fiscal health and future of the furniture design industry.

Currently furniture designers have none of the protections offered by copyright and are therefore vulnerable to unscrupulous imitators and knockoffs. There is little incentive to develop and produce original, innovative and advanced technologies and products if rivals can profit from the hard work of others. Competitors that copy the work of other designers and manufacturers already have an economic advantage because they do not have to recoup the money spent in research and development. Without providing any compensation to the original creators they are in fact stealing their work. And right now this is legal.

Furthermore if a rival is looking to knockoff a product and avoid paying royalty and licensing fees they will also be looking for other ways to reduce costs, including cheaper production methods and materials. This often leads to lower quality products. For many consumers who aren’t savvy enough to distinguish between the knockoff and the original this could create confusion in the marketplace as to the quality of the original product.

Legitimate manufacturers of properly licensed products then find themselves in competition with knockoffs and this leads to a downward spiral of cost cutting in the search for profits in the global marketplace. This puts the legitimate manufacturers under great strain as they try bear the costs maintaining their commitment to development, quality and service, which their rivals do not. The ultimate loser is the consumer who buys the cheap knockoffs that aren’t worth their hard earned money at any price.

Copyright law in the U.S. is intentionally broad to cover as many situations as possible in order to keep what is already a Byzantine process from getting totally out of control. However this also ignores the unique differences and special needs of particular industries. This is true of patent law as well.

Currently copyright law does not protect “useful articles” such as furniture. This is considered the purview of patent law. However patents with their standard of novelty are more difficult and costly to obtain. The patent guidelines require that the design be so revolutionary as to be “unanticipated” in prior art, while copyright merely requires a lack of plagiarism and a modicum of originality.

The rules covering “useful articles” are often thought to be immutable, but this is not the case. The very bill you are sponsoring, the Design Piracy Prohibition Act, will create a sui generis protection for fashion design. This is based on the precedent set forth in the Vessel Hull Design Protection Act that was enacted as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In both cases, copyright holders of fashion designs and vessel hull designs are given a limited period of exclusive rights.

In my opinion, what strikes even closer to home for furniture designers is the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act (AWCPA) that Congress passed in 1990. Prior to the passage of the AWCPA, building plans, drawings and blueprints were protected by copyright law, but not the actual building itself. The only way to protect your design from being ripped off was to never actually build it.

With the passage of the AWCPA Congress defined a protected “architectural work” to include “the design of a building as embodied in any tangible medium of expression, including a building, architectural plans or drawings.” This protection is limited providing that “[t]he work includes the overall form as well as the arrangement and composition of spaces and elements in the design, but does not include individual standard features.”

It seems to me that similar language would be very appropriate for furniture designers. But whether this approach is pursued or the one that you are championing for fashion design, I leave that to you and the rest of our elected representatives in Congress.

What I do ask is that I urge you to pass your current amendment, the Design Piracy Prohibition Act, and extend copyright protections to the fashion industry. And I also urge you to consider extending that right to other creators, including furniture designers to ensure fairness and justice in the marketplace as well as ensuring the fiscal health and future of the furniture design industry.

Sincerely,

Lawrence Chabra