Copyrighting Fashion: Who Gains? By FREAKONOMICS
Kal Raustiala, a professor at UCLA Law School and the UCLA International Institute, and Chris Sprigman, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, are experts in counterfeiting and intellectual property. They have been guest-blogging for us about copyright issues. Today, they write about new efforts to extend copyright law to the fashion industry.
The Private Interest in Public Laws By Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman
In previous posts, we wrote about knockoffs, a widespread practice in the fashion industry. American law does not prohibit copying fashion designs. Paradoxically, the payoff from free copying has been enormous. Copying helps set trends (you can’t know it’s a trend until it’s been copied) and then helps destroy them – once a design has been widely copied, the fashion-forward hop on to the next new thing. This is the familiar fashion cycle. What’s less obvious is that the absence of copyright makes the process