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This Journalist is REALLY Pissed Off About Design Piracy
Devaluing the work of young designers, transforming design classics into "pieces of sh*t" and more
By Rain Noe - August 2, 2016
I just read a scathing critique of the lack of copyright protection for industrial designers: Australian journalist Joe Aston's "Industrial designers deserve [the] same copyright treatment as Hollywood." In it, self-professed design-lover Aston sounds extremely pissed off, takes shots at both America and Asia, and makes some points you've heard before, some you haven't:
How is it a gross moral and commercial trangression to download a film or an album from a file sharer, denying the filmmaker or songwriter rightful compensation for their work, yet the purchase of a blatant rip-off of a designer's original chair or table or lamp is a misdeed we sanction?
I'd argue that Hollywood studios have put systems in place to detect illegal downloads, and that these systems can be operated by people sitting at computers. Spotting and tracking knock-off furniture, in contrast, must be performed by people in the field doing physical inspections. If the knock-off furniture is coming in from overseas, ports make good choke points to deploy them, as Norway has shown; but how do you catch domestic pirates?
Aston's take on the "design should be for the masses" argument:
Proponents of ripped-off furniture argue that good design should be accessible to the masses. But there's a clear difference between accessible style and stolen style. Which is why a developed economy prohibits High Street shops from selling fake Louis Vuitton luggage. Leave that to Thailand and Indonesia. Otherwise, what other possessions should people have a right to that they can't afford? A Porsche? Bang & Olufsen TVs?
That seems like a bit of a stretch to me, but I'll let him have that one. Here's the bit I found most interesting:
There is plenty of good, affordable and original furniture available today – and regulating against fakes would only ensure there is more still, to satisfy that transferred demand. It might be Eames and Philippe Starck and Hans Wegner who're copied, but it's the young designers whose work the fake market devalues.
"Replicas", as is their Orwellian descriptor (it's like referring to "rape" as "sex"), also devalue the classics, so in fact do not make good design accessible. They do precisely the opposite.
They kill it. Take Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona chair. It's beautiful. But given the proliferation of fakes in corporate lobbies, and bogan homes, it's now untouchable for anyone serious about architecture, art or design. Which is a travesty.
Our market is flooded with product – like Eames by Aldi – that breaks and scratches and falls apart and, basically, looks like shit. Thus in the mind of the next generation of consumers, what was once a classic feat of creativity and craftsmanship is now a piece of shit.
I thought he went a bit too far with the "rape" analogy—you can tell the man is angry—but I can't argue with his point about the Barcelona chair. When you see it, or LC2 knockoffs, everywhere, the design seems less special, does it not? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
What do you think of his points, and should good design be for the masses? If so, at what cost? Also: Do you think van der Rohe and Le Corbusier would be elated, or disgusted, to see their designs so widely "distributed?"
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Rain Noe
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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This Journalist is REALLY Pissed Off About Design Piracy
Replicas, licensed or not, are no problem. You want an original for historical sake, good. If a design is good and good enough that it be copied to the point of being generic then it was a design with merit. A curious question to ask might be the Shelby Cobra, original vs the popular Kit car variants. I'm told there were about 1000 originals and 10,000 kit replicas. Do those replicas de-value the original or make them worth more?
In some cases the originals are more popular precisely because the kit replicas brought the design more attention and people could say "I have seen the Cobras around, but I've now seen a REAL one." But then there's a massive quagmire once you start contemplating whether there's modern reproductions that might be 'better' than the original as a car, and whether certain performance or aesthetic improvements are a good thing to put on originals or replicas or none of them. If a company makes an exact replica of the original car vs a 'lookalike' using vastly different internals, how's that play out? Maybe it's a good design, and people have a need for it besides pure aesthetic. Is a modern replica P51 made of Composite materials and using a different engine a bad thing because it's a better performer at air-races? Should the team have instead developed a brand new aircraft design from the ground up instead of aping the look of a P51? This has happened, more than once, so it's not a hypothetical. It's hard to draw lines in all this. Hard to say "well copying a P51 Mustang is just cool!" Then to say "don't make crappy knockoff Cobras because we're already inundated with crappy knockoffs and it makes the original seem less interesting"
I guess if the original is lessened by the knockoffs than was it really that awesome to begin with, or is it just elevated by something besides its design qualities and its value is more in the status or nostalgia or rarity?
The classic car analogy is interesting because there's such variety within the buyers, from the fanatics who want a car where "the numbers match" to the guys who don't care how much Bondo it took to get it *looking* original. Or guys who want the '65 Mustang they dreamt of in their youth and would happily buy the modern-day licensed replica with modern underpinnings.
As for the question of "was it really that awesome to begin with, or is it just elevated by....", I dunno, that's a great question. There is that question of overload fatigue. For example I love the '63 Corvette split-window coupe and I've only seen three in person. If they were reproduced and became popular to the point where I saw 100 of them every day, I do wonder if my perception of the uniqueness of the design would begin to fade. If so, that judgment probably wouldn't be fair to the original designer.
It is certainly a point that designers' creativity is far less protected than many other fields . . . or is it? I found interesting that the reference for design too often points to a narrow field of design, the highly priced furniture/home interior product design field or similar. In that fact there is certain arrogance to the discussion. Product design, industrial design, whatever the denomination you want to use, is a very broad field. While there are many instances of "fame" for some known designers who often happen to work on high priced items (design quality and intent being far more privileged in that context from its inception), there are far more designers equally creative who in actuality work for the everyday person, for the mass production of goods, or more directly for companies who will own the rights of their creativity, the products they design, their own creations. And in those numerous instances the designer's rights has already been sold-out, and further more the copyrights is in the hand of a third party to start with. So when Joe Aston gets upset about rip-offs, he is really upset about the devaluation of the product the owner or user get. Does the cheap knock-off devalue the original intent? Sure it does some. The best implementation is always preferable. But was that original intent pure of heart to start with, or already driven by a sense of luxury and privilege that still remains in the original make, and in essence are marketed to two very different group of people who can certainly make the difference themselves? If you own an original Eames chair (as it seems has become the only good reference of good design, the so called design lovers can speak of now days) you'll know and feel the difference. The saying remains, you get what you pay for. You can own an original Monet, or buy the poster. Certainly most can make the difference. With luck and talent, one can design for the awesomeness of great design, but cannot stop the fundamental good ideas from spreading to all, and that is a compliment in itself, and perhaps knockoffs are the best reward a designer can get.
The choke point is not the ports, this thinking comes from the same era as these chairs.
I disagree with your first and second point, because while the "few large online retailers" are visible, there seem to be scores of smaller companies that can escape online detection. The case in Norway, for example, the restaurateur had ordered the chairs from a Chinese company through a catalog. Had someone at the docks not opened that crate, it would've gone undetected. Also, I'm skeptical that a Chinese knockoff factory is going to obey "just an email."
I can't argue with your last point, though, and it's well put. That's the real crux of all of this, and kind of a shame, isn't it?
In Australia, it seems that even if the law changed to protect original designs for longer, the market is still too small to be worth getting patents for furniture let alone the cost of defending them.
You get what you pay for, if its a fake and you got it for cheap and were foolish enough to not do your home work, then Caveat emptor
I don't buy his bull shit, design cost money, either you can afford it or you cant.
the burden is on the the manufacturer, they want to make money like any manufacturer, they price their products accordingly.
DRM has not stopped piracy, perhaps even encouraged it some would argue.
Hard to knock off a Porsche isn't it? Technology changes..., it's much easier to knock off that chair than it used to be.
I suspect that van der Rohe and Le Corbusier got paid to do their design work. Get over it.
You can spend your money to file a patent and show the world your blue print or you can forgo the patent and let them reverse engineer it the hard way. Either way if it's a good product it's going to get ripped of in part or full. Move on, design the next great product. Nothing older than last years show car , or that old 1929 Barcelona chair.....
Sadly distributors such as DWR, Vitra ect. with such pretentious attitudes leave the "common man" with no other choice. Why should good design be only for the wealthy ?
I have mixed feelings about this kind of thinking. On the one hand, as am "the common man" I can empathize, and lament that I'll likely never be able to afford some of the furniture classics I really love.
On the other hand I realize that designers or manufacturers set out to maximize their profit, and these days it seems more profitable to cater to the wealthy and increasingly, ultra-wealthy. And that is their decision to make.
As for companies with pretentious attitudes, I don't like that, but we can hardly regulate companies or people into being non-pretentious. Nor do I feel it's right to break the law or violate patents they hold because we do not agree with their pricing.
It would be interesting to see a firebrand, upstart designer who would produce good design only for the unwealthy. But I cynically wonder how long it would be until s/he crossed over to the dark side, lured by greater profits.
When you talk about an upstart designer catering to the unwealthy, are you referring to IKEA?
I'd say both (Hollywood vs ID) thefts are equally bad and equally protected/protectable, but ID is harder to track like you said.
Or, you can take the other side and declare that music/movies/books/images/etc do not deserve perpetual protection. 20 years of a monopoly is more than enough time to profit. Anything beyond is just plain greed.
Right, David— There was a howl when the Sonny Bono laws passed, extending copyright into near perpetuity. Are we now saying that's fine, but let's extend it to other areas? I'd rather see parity by knocking back copyrights to a more reasonable term.
David, I assume you're being facetious to make a point? (I cannot detect your tone via the text.)
I'm dead serious. Patents give you protection for 20 years. Seems reasonable, I suppose you could argue +/- a few years.