Legal Question

[Cecil Arnold]

Allen, one other thing. Your design protection in Mexico might be different than in the US.

[Wes Bischel]

Wes & Joe,
Great discussion, good info from different sources and angles. The bottom line is, unless your willing to expend money on Lawyers, your protection, even under copyright, may offer no protection at all. I feel for the Jewelry Artists, I understand they are getting knocked off daily, by overseas manufacturers.

Ain't that the truth. I've had a few designs "borrowed" and it was determined it was more cost effective to let things be.

Oh well, Good luck Allen!

Wes

[Allen Grimes]

Actually Cecil, it's the US I am worried about, I plan on moving back home in a few years. The competition in Mexico is basicly non-existent.

Thanks, Wes

[Barry O'Mahony]

What I want to protect are the designs themselves, not the pictures. I want to sell furniture and I have some pretty original designs that I havent seen in any of the bigger furniture stores or websites or anywhere else for that matter.

The reason why I wanted to know if my work would be protected here is because I dont want somebody to see my designs and use them for their own business before I get a chance to.

What you need is a Design Patent. These cover the look and appearance of the design itself.

An example: Monster Cable, the company that sells what it describes as "high performance" audio and video cables for consumer electronics. In their advertising, they make a big deal over ther "patented technology". If you do a search of the USPTO database, though, you'll see that most of these are design patents. They prevent competitors from copying the color scheme, patterns, shape of the connector shell, etc., that Monster uses.

Design Patents are pretty cheap and easy to get as patents go, although not as easy as copyrights, which under the Berne Convention are acquired as soon as an expression of an idea is 'affixed to a tangible medium', as other posters have noted.

[Allen Grimes]

Thanks Barry, I'll look that up.

[Jamie Buxton]

I have a friend who is a furniture designer, and a lawyer specializing in intellectual property. (Well, actually he makes his living as a lawyer, and has great hopes of success in furniture design. He's kinda like the actors who support themselves waiting tables or driving taxis.) He's looked long and hard at the issue of legal protection for his furniture designs. He says that it can't be done.

He says that you can get a design patent fairly easily. However, they're so narrowly defined that if your competitor just changes a few dimensions he can evade the patent.

He says that the only way to stay ahead of your competition is to out-produce and out-market them.

[Jim Becker]

This kind of discussion comes up from time to time with turners. In the sense of "art", there is a sense of ethical boundry when it comes to copying others' work...but there will always be some folks who copy "really closely" and try to benefit from it. The same holds true for furniture, although there are more compelling "commercial" risks than with craft art, IMHO. I think that there is merit in registering/copyrighting/etc. one's unique designs for products such as furniture with the understanding that actual enforcement will be difficult or impossible to effect in the real world. At the same time, you have to ask yourself, is my design really unique, or just an adaptation of something that has already been done...

[Marvin Keys]

I don't know about most of you, but I get most of my furniture building ideas from something that has already been produced. Granted I don't sell anything to anyone, but if I see something I like at a store, I might take a picture of it, take a look and get an idea of its measurements and then go home and start a sketch-up design, put together a cut list, buy the lumber and build it. Am I stealing from someone when I do that? In some industries they call it reverse engineering and they get away with it. I'm not sure where I come down on this. I don't think what I am doing is wrong in any way, but if I bought a piece and took precise measurements and proceeded to mass market the exact same piece of furniture, I think I would be in the wrong. I'm not sure at what point the protection should or would kick in.

In any event, I am an attorney and I would have to say that it would be virtually impossible to prove that I copied you, unless every aspect of the piece was identical. As soon as I put in an extra rounded over section or used mortise and tenon joinery when you used pocket joinery, or I used veneer and you used solid wood, I could probably successfully argue that mine is not the same as yours.

[Barry O'Mahony]

Am I stealing from someone when I do that?

For it to be stealing, it would have to be against the law. Since it's not, it can't be stealing.

As you've mentioned, copying is Standard Operating Procedure in many (most?) industries. Drugs are copied by companies making "generics" as soon as their patents expire. The multi-billion dollar PC industry would not exist if IBM's original design hadn't been copied by other firms almost exactly, and "clean room" copyright-workaround techniques hadn't been used to duplicate the functionality of the IBM PC's BIOS code.

If it's not illegal, it is de facto encouraged by the government, which sets the ground rules for how the marketplace works. And money always flows to the path of least resistance.

Personally, with regards to the question of ethics rather an illegality, I'd say it was only unethical to claim that the design was an original one by you, if in fact it's copy of someone else's.

[Tom Donalek]

To follow up on Wes' post, I'm an architect. My boss had never bothered to put copyright notices on his drawings, but I've started doing it - it took 5 minutes to add a notice to our standard sheet border in CAD. About all we can expect in terms of legal protection is to prevent an owner or contractor from taking our drawings for one building and building another copy of it without paying us. After all, most buildings are pretty similar when you get down to the guts of them. (Also, I don't really buy the cultural concept that artists/designers are 'original' - as Picasso said, "good artists copy, great artists steal!") Something like the standard McDonald's design elements can be effectively controlled, but you can't really copyright a normal house gable, for instance. Certain aspects of furniture design are pretty similar. But then, I won't be surprised when some corporate lawyer from a big furniture company tries to copyright the raised panel or the tapered leg.

(Speaking of the 'strengthening' of IP (Intellectual Property) laws, there are a lot of people who see the current US system as having grown totally out of whack - mostly this is in the realm of patents, but the current copyright system is a bit out of whack. Prior to the 1976 law, copyrights lasted for several decades - fair enough: in order to encourage innovation, you get those decades to profit from your work. But in 1976 and again in 1998, two laws were passed to extend copyright - in a strange coincidence, both were passed just in time to prevent Mickey Mouse from passing into the public domain - hmmmmm. Currently, copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years!?!)

There are some good articles on Copyright in the Wikipedia, including useful information on registering your work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright