Cease and Desist: Copyright and Design
From Mod Mania
Cease and Desist: Copyright and Design
In 1962, an artist by the name of Andy Warhol exhibited a series of works featuring Campbell’s soup cans. In 2004, John Young began selling old Sony Walkman tape players, modified to carry Apple’s Ipod. Warhol went on to become the highest earning living artist in the US, while Young was told to stop. Now to compare a famed artist to backyard modifier may seem like rather a long bow to draw, the issue of copyright was dealt with very differently.
Campbell’s, it seems, was sensible enough to realise that whilst they may have had a case for copyright infringement against Warhol (his screen prints being a clear derivative work of the now iconic label), he was doing the company no harm. In fact, it was probably good publicity. Campbell’s were so comfortable with the work, that they provided labels to Warhol straight from the factory to use as invitations for a later exhibition. And that was that really. Just creativity building on the past, as Lessig would say.
More than 40 years later, Sony has taken the alternative approach. Within 6 weeks of the product making its modest debut on the internet, John Young was sent a cease and desist letter in relation to his ‘Retropod’ modification. They claimed that “[Consumers] will be misled into thinking that Sony is backward in its design”. Now as the owner of several Sony products, I’m offended that they should think their consumers are so daft. To think that such a low volume product could have a financial impact on one of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world is ridiculous. But for whatever reason, Sony decided to put a stop to it, which in the current legal environment is a totally OK thing to do. As soon as Young began hacking away to make space inside the old player for an Ipod, the Walkman was now a derivative work. And as soon as he started selling it, he was in breech of the protections offered to Sony by copyright.
This is something worth noting, that copyright covers derivative works. Imagine for a second what nature would be like if derivative works were not allowed. If you believe an ounce of what Darwin had to say, you would see that neither you nor I would be here. ‘We’ would be single cellular organisms floating in whatever pool of muck happened to be around, because we could not build on the past. If copyright were 100% efficient, we would be stuck in the middle of the 20th century with whatever culture we had. The absurdity is that building on the past and outright copying still happens on a large scale, but Retropods can be shut down with no right of reply.
Thankfully not all companies take such a draconian approach. For example the design firm ‘Bootleg Objects’ exclusively produces (and sells) modifications of existing designs, and there is nothing to show that they have had any trouble, even with companies such as B&O, Braun and Herman Miller.
A future without a culture is pretty bleak, but there are ways of stemming the rapid growth of copyright protection. The Creative Commons is an organisation that writes copyright licences that are freely available for use by the public. This enables people to keep only the rights that they want, and turf all the others automatically given to them by the prevailing copyright system. This is, in effect, the formalisation of the attitude of Campbell’s, Braun etc, except that now the artist knows where they stand, rather than risk a Sony experience.
But initiatives such as these are stop-gap measures. What is really needed is change to the prevailing, automatically inferred protections. We need to “enable the future by limiting the power of the past”(Lessig, 2002). And we need to do it before we as a society are sucked so deep into this paradigm that we cannot see the exit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell's_Soup_Cans#_note-L32
Viewed 18/10/07
http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html Viewed 18/10/07
http://www.retropod.com/ Viewed 18/10/07
http://www.bootleg-objects.com/index.htm Viewed 18/10/07
http://creativecommons.org/ Viewed 18/10/07
- Rohan Bevan
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