Johanna Blakley gave a very interesting Ted Talk on Lessons
From Fashion’s Free Culture. She used fashion industry as an example to
challenge some of the common conceptions of IP protections. For one, more
protection does not necessarily correlate with higher gross sales. To support
her observation, she showed a graph with gross sales across different
industries. Interestingly, the gross sales for low I.P protection industries
such as fashion and food are much higher that of ones with high protection
industries such as book and film. While these differences are probably exaggerated
due to different cost and profit calculations for respective industries, I
think she nonetheless provides insightful analysis on how low IP protection in
fact pushed the designers to innovate more.
Johanna’s search for underlying logic behind things that are copyright protected and those that are not is similarly thought provoking. Two important aspects she found are 1) artistic objects deserve protection and utilitarian objects do not; and 2) idea that needs to freely circulate has no protection while physically fixed expression of an idea do have protection. She has correctly pointed out that in the modern world the boundary between what’s artistic and utilitarian is blurring and the advancement of technologies put everything on digital files. As technology becomes more integrated to our daily lives and works, copyright industry will face unprecedented challenge as many of the current IP laws are defined by physically objects. It is time to revise these IP laws.
I really love how you chose this talk to discuss in your blog. It does a great job in showing that industries can still thrive even without intellectual property protection. Comparing the fashion industry to an industry subject to copyrights such as film, it's easy to see that the revenue and innovation developed by fashion designers easily outweighs that of photographers.
ReplyDeleteI really like what you talk about in this post! Really resonated with me also.
ReplyDeleteI really like what you talk about in this post! Really resonated with me also.
ReplyDeleteHello!
ReplyDeleteI also analyzed this Ted Talk and found it incredibly interesting as well. I agree that the patent office calling all clothing "utilitarian" and therefore giving them no justifiable need for a patent is not entirely fair. I agree with Johanna when she says that yes- utilitarian objects should not be patented, but artistic ones should be. This makes sense to me since some new fashion is so innovative and deserves recognition. Overall, really enjoyed this post.
Great post Yi! I also did this video as one of my TED talks. I think that fashion is so progressive for not having copyright restrictions in the industry. Your analysis was very thorough.
ReplyDeleteHey! Great post! I completely agree with you! Fashion is so different because they can copy and build off of each other. Its so interesting that the free culture is accepted in fashion. good post discussing this idea :)
ReplyDeleteHi Yi! This is a great post, and I like all your summary of Blakley. I especially like how you mentioned her point of artistic objects deserve protection and utilitarian objects do not, and that is a very interesting claim!
ReplyDeleteHi Yi,
ReplyDeleteThis blog post is great. I learned a lot by reading through it, especially about your particular opinion on fashion industry. I agree with Johanna when she says that yes- utilitarian objects should not be patented, but artistic ones should be. Overall, really enjoyed this post.