Did Claire’s Accessories rip off Tatty Devine?
A shop allegedly copies the work of a designer, social-media shit storm ensures:
I’m no lawyer but I wouldn’t be surprised if Claires Accessories have bought these in good faith and it’s a third party that has carried out any alleged ripping-off, but nevertheless:
Comments on the Tatty Devive blog are interesting, a lot of snobbery, ‘they will be able to afford to wear what I wear now’ -stuff.
hyltom, very nice design work. The design language that ties the whole product line/brand together is great!
This is very interesting. What can a small business do against a huge company who steals the IP?
Do the design patents matter at all if you can`t afford to fight it out in court?
Social media seems like great alternative defence (assuming there are enough followers to make a point).
Not only Chinese but also many countries copy. Known to all , Jobs created Apple’s graphic OS after visitting a lab. Windows then copied Apple.
Basically, the coffee maker was well rendered and looks nice. But there is not special idea in the design. You can not distinguish it from others if it is shown with others in shop.
Did everyone forget last weeks post about Everything is a Remix:
Basically, the coffee maker was well rendered and looks nice. But there is not special idea in the design. You can not distinguish it from others if it is shown with others in shop.[/quote]
You’re absolutley right but the question was if it was ok for that company to produce it although the client used to be someone else.
Everyone copies a little here and a little there and brings in a touch of their own but stealing is different. If everyone could steal someone elses work then we would probably be in the stone age regarding consumer electronics. There has to be competition or things don’t move forward.
On the “influence-theft” spectrum, the coffee machine is more to the “influence” end, while the jewellery is on the theiving side. I can see the coffee machine case defending itself much much better than the jewellery case.
Theft with attribution/ transformation is art, theft and trying to pass it off as your own work is plagiarism.
Sanjy: I’m not so sure. The jewelry making business is like hip hop. Innovation is nearly non-existant, it’s just the art of remixing existing components. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that, what we view as the original, was actually a copy of jewelry from yet another artist living somewhere else. Or that it was developed independently multiple times in multiple places, possibly including these two examples.
Yep, agree to a point. Good remixing involves transformation, taking one part of another whole and doing something to it, otherwise it is just a copy, which isn’t a bad thing as long as the source is attributed.
Looking a bit further into the Tatty Devine issue (it involved the Daily Mail, now I feel dirty) the examples of ‘copying’ are becoming tenuous:
The Matt Blatt case now means every furniture copy they sell is now labelled ‘replica’. I wonder if this loophole will be used in the future in other industries:
http://www.mattblatt.com.au/PlayVideo.aspx?element=113&category=1&ProductId=1517
Sanjy: Thanks for the update…wow Claire’s really did just their development by visiting Tatty Devine…ugh.
However, it reminds me of something I read about 3M recently. They say they know that the new products they developed will be quickly copied, therefore their strategy is to launch a new product with huge marketing and healthy margins and get out as soon as the knock-offs arrive. They develop enough new products that the knock-offs don’t hurt them.
The question killing everyone, what software program were those renderings done on? And BTW, are you running a spell checker?
I’m going to guess 3ds Max, and no. 
Most Chinese OEMs use Max or Cinema, the final render will usually be done with all the right assembly parts from ProE. making small details more visible and better for their sales catalog. You guys should see what some of this 20 year olds to with ProE just amazing
3D done with Rhinoceros 3D and rendering using Maxwell Render.