As Nicole Richie or Amanda Seyfried posed their way into the Kodak Theatre on Oscars night, you could almost hear the sound of sewing machines revving up at fashion copycat firms like Faviana in New York to create watered-down versions of Reem Acra or Armani Prive. Seyfried’s dress was on the runway months ago, but now that it’s been worn by a Hollywood it-girl, expect to see a couture-lite version at a senior prom in Tustin.
And that’s a good thing, argues UCLA law professor Kal Raustiala and University of Virginia law professor Chris Sprigman on the NYT’s Freakonomics Blog. The post was a direct rebuttal to the Design Piracy Protection Act, currently wending it way through Congressional subcommittees with bipartisan support.
Fashion largely remains outside the bounds of copyright protection (labels, however, are protected under trademark, even if it doesn’t exactly seem that way when strolling down Santee Alley on a Tuesday morning). But the DPPA, the two profs argue, is an attack on both unmoneyed consumers who still want to be on-trend and emerging designers who could easily be browbeaten into obscurity by established companies who may claim to have started the trend —and have the legal resources to make sure the courts agree with them, however spurious their claim.
“The bottom line,” the authors write, “is that there is no shortage of innovation in the U.S. fashion industry. Right now, in studios in New York and Los Angeles, uncounted thousands of designers are busy churning out new designs. And they are also busy copying and ‘interpreting’ one another.”
Raustialia and Sprigman argue that copyright is only appropriate to protect against systematic harm affecting the industry as a whole, not mere individual cases that crop up (Trovata v. Forever 21, for example). But meanwhile, as Sprigman has written about in the past, lobbyists in other creative industries routinely tongue-bathe Congress for copyright extensions serving no basis other than the enrichment of the copyright holders themselves (the Supreme Court has held that laws extending such rights are constitutional). While fast fashion is certainly a boon to those who cannot afford to dress like Richie or Seyfried, its increasing reach into the retail world begs a meta-study on how it truly affects the small-scale designers whose work they consistently feed upon.
