14 ms·

EU expands copyright to furniture and extends term by a century

105 points by mirceasoaica 10y ago

snsr 10y ago
This is possibly the dumbest idea I've ever encountered.
- pavlov 10y ago
  That's how a lot of people felt about software copyrights in 1976, when Bill Gates wrote this letter to the nascent computer community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists If you work in the software industry today, IP protection is part of what keeps you paid, and it's hypocritical to want to deny the same protection to other creative professionals... Especially considering how hard it is to make a living as a furniture designer compared to a software developer. (That said, I would definitely vote for shortening copyright terms across the board. Something like 50 years from creation date would be fine IMO. These "X years after death" provisions are ridiculous because they only serve to make payouts to descendants that didn't participate in the original creative work.)
  - clavalle 10y ago
    Fifty years? I think 10 is more than enough. Maybe 15.
  - drdaeman 10y ago
    > IP protection is part of what keeps you paid For worse or better, I think that's not that that true anymore in today's SaaS-ish world, like it used to be in 90's or early 00's.
  - Ace17 10y ago
    > if you work in the software industry today, IP protection is part of what keeps you paid What about software people working at Google, Facebook, Amazon, and virtually any other online service?
    - pavlov 10y ago
      Google, Facebook and Amazon own plenty of copyrights and patents. I don't see them campaigning to eliminate IP law. Even though the corporations release a lot of open source, they probably prefer the current status quo of explicit licenses placed on code they choose to release, rather than an alternative world of all code being in public domain. I don't see how it would be to Google's advantage if source code had no IP status at all: an ex-employee could keep a copy of the Google source tree and legally put it on Github.
  - jordigh 10y ago
    > If you work in the software industry today, IP protection is part of what keeps you paid, I work in a company that does assessments for other companies. I write in-house software to perform those assessments. They give us the data and we give them reports. There's no "IP" [sic] involved in any of this. There are service contracts and so forth, but my salary would come just as well if our customers had our source code (not that any of them would know what to do with it). Our company provides a service in the form of trained professionals who know how to perform the assessment aided by the software written by people like me who do it. I guess maybe our brand name is important, so perhaps trademarks help us, but that's a completely separate matter from what you are blanket calling "IP". We do not rely on patents (design or not) or copyright to get our pay.
    - collyw 10y ago
      I bet a lot of companies values would go down if the saw the general shoddiness of code in our industry.
jordigh 10y ago
So, I just went to Wikipedia to try to understand design patents. They differ from copyright in that to defend them in court, you don't have to prove that the infringing item was copied from your design, right? (Their terms are also much shorter than copyright, but historically both patents and copyright were no longer than at most a couple of decades.) What's the societal purpose of design patents? I get the purpose of utility patents: tell us how you did it, and in exchange we promise not to compete with you for a while. Utility patents are an alternative to trade secrets. But with a design patent, what is society getting in exchange? Giving designers more of an incentive to produce original designs? Does originality suffer without it? I guess now that copyright is going to cover furniture, the difference is that the term is ridiculously longer (effectively indefinite), but designers also have to prove that there was deliberate copying if they want to sue for infringement?
- toyg 10y ago
  > what is society getting in exchange? Not closing all existing creative businesses in developed countries, which would otherwise be completely unprotected against the knock-off industry from countries where manufacturing is extra-cheap.
  - morsch 10y ago
    Can't be that great at creating if they're still depending on decades old designs.
    - visarga 10y ago
      Well, now they will have to be more creative, and the law works both ways, their designs will also be protected. So everyone will have slightly or more different designs, just for the sake of being different.
    - toyg 10y ago
      Nobody said otherwise, but they do provide employment and profit for the highly-skilled. This development fits the "market of ideas" vision that developed countries have pushed ever since they lost manufacturing superiority to Asian countries. It's an overall attempt at maintaining some sort of upper hand in the commercial sector. Expect copyright and patent laws to be tweaked to cover more and more sectors - already they have been successfully leveraged in the food industry, for example, with "protected origin" programs. The unfortunate side-effect is that we're edging closer and closer towards thoughtcrime: if the objects of crime are ideas, the agents to police must be minds.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
carlob 10y ago
So http://voga.com http://voga.com is dead?
- aswerty 10y ago
  From my understanding of it, yes.
pmontra 10y ago
I wonder who's being affected by this law. Very few people buy designer furniture costing thousands of Euros. Furthermore you can have 100,000 songs, 1,000 movies, 100 clothes but only a few chairs. So the Chinese will keep selling cheap furniture with some changes to the design and the EU manufacturers won't make much more. Example This chair is extremely popular in cheap restaurants, plastic made https://dearchiworld.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/no-14-chair-michael-thonet/ https://dearchiworld.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/no-14-chair-mi... The Thonet company still sells it (couldn't find the price) and I found it on Alibaba starting from $25. It's so old that's out of the reach of the law but if it wasn't do we really think they're not going to tweak the design and that their EU customers will care and go buying from Thonet instead?
- toyg 10y ago
  If cheap manufacturers were forced to significantly tweak the design, it would become easier to spot a fake, which means expensive restaurants would more willingly pay the difference to get originals. If everyone could just slap the same glowing apple on their laptop lid, there would be less incentive for people to get original Apple laptops. Same here.
  - VLM 10y ago
    "it would become easier to spot a fake" For a theoretical example look at the situation with Wooton desks and their multiple trim levels. They'll just be more trim levels to work around the copyright. Obviously the specific example of Wooton desks don't matter because that design is about 150 years old. But it is an example of a general class of problem. In my infinite spare time I enjoy fine carpentry for relaxation, as do a couple other people here, and on my infinite list of things to do is make either a copy of a Wooton or make a Wooton / 43 folders mashup. And running off extra copies doesn't take much extra time, and selling extra copies is an interesting way to pay for your supplies. So this kind of thing could theoretically impact small craftsmen not just Chinese factories.
    - toyg 10y ago
      > They'll just be more trim levels to work around the copyright. Which is why there are judges and court cases to decide if design patents are infringed, otherwise we'd have machines that simply compare pictures. If your desk is exactly the same as the original bar a few trim levels, a judge will likely find you're infringing. > So this kind of thing could theoretically impact small craftsmen not just Chinese factories. That's entirely possible, but not a new phenomenon. Can small craftsmen make and sell statues of Han Solo without infringing Disney's copyright?
scholia 10y ago
From the Guardian story at https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jul/29/buy-design-classic-now-about-to-rocket-in-price-copyright-law https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jul/29/buy-design-cla... "Take, for example, the famous Eames walnut and leather armchair with matching ottoman. The officially licensed and copyrighted producer, Vitra, sells them for £6,814 in John Lewis. Yet copies made in Chinese factories sell over the internet and in some stores for as little as £399." Later: "With an estimated 54 factories in China making Eames furniture alone, he [David Woods, a copyright laywer] predicts the closure of websites producing bargain basement, mass-produced copies of furniture, 'as after all, this was their business model'."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
japs 10y ago
As a person who values good design (and has spent what many would think way too much for a table lamp), I don't see this law as totally absurd: they are basically putting design and works of art (think paintings, pictures, novels) on the same level. The real problem is that copyright law is flawed, and terms should be reduced, both for designs and for works of art.
- EdHominem 10y ago
  In art the only thing that matters is the presentation so there's no societal need for me to copy your art because it serves no function. But with something like a lamp (or chair) the presentation is also the function. If you're the first person to put a switch on the lamp as opposed to the cable, simply because you're the first to source a good enough switch to survive in that form factor, do you deserve protection for that cost/benefit tradeoff? For a century? And doesn't that penalize the switch maker? They do all the work and you're merely the first to slap it on your design so you claim exclusive right to use it, destroying their market for their product.
MistahKoala 10y ago
"This change means that people will be prohibited from using 3D printing and other maker technologies to manufacture such objects, and that for a full century." Undermining the premise of an argument in the first paragraph with a complete mistruth doesn't bode well for the ground it's built on. To say that this change will prevent makers from using 3D printing to produce furniture is significantly more absurd than the idea of protecting makers' own designs from unscrupulous exploitation by manufacturers.
- pjc50 10y ago
  > this change will prevent makers from using 3D printing to produce furniture Surely that's (part of) the intent of the change?
  - MistahKoala 10y ago
    It won't stop them from using 3D printing to produce furniture, though. It's absurd for the article to say that it will as the only thing it's intended to prevent is protected designs being ripped off. If someone wants to design their own furniture, they'll still be free to do that, as well as make it freely available if they wish.
SubiculumCode 10y ago
ah the rentier economy.
mlinksva 10y ago
Anyone have a link to the EU ruling? I read the Guardian article this blog post riffs on yesterday, searched for ruling, and couldn't find.
gulpahum 10y ago
Laws about making copies for private use differ from EU country to another. The author is only talking about UK, which has strict laws about copying for private use. For instance, it is illegal to copy CDs [1] or entire books [2] for private use in UK. In Finland, it is legal to copy CDs (even the ones in public libraries!) [3] and entire books [4] for private use. So, I don't think that 3D printing of furniture is affected in Finland. I can happily continue printing my Ikea chairs. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/12021607/Why-in-2015-is-ripping-CDs-still-illegal-in-the-UK.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/12021607/Why-in-2... [2] https://www.reading.ac.uk/library/finding-info/copyright/lib-copyright-photocopying.aspx https://www.reading.ac.uk/library/finding-info/copyright/lib... [3] http://www.kysy.fi/en/kysymys/it-helsinki-city-library-legal-copy-cds-and-dvds http://www.kysy.fi/en/kysymys/it-helsinki-city-library-legal... [4] http://blogs.helsinki.fi/copyright-within-teaching/exceptions/private-use/ http://blogs.helsinki.fi/copyright-within-teaching/exception...
ashitlerferad 10y ago
I for one look forward to IKEA violating the GPL on copylefted furniture designs.

105 points by mirceasoaica 10y ago

snsr 10y ago

This is possibly the dumbest idea I've ever encountered.

pavlov 10y ago
That's how a lot of people felt about software copyrights in 1976, when Bill Gates wrote this letter to the nascent computer community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists If you work in the software industry today, IP protection is part of what keeps you paid, and it's hypocritical to want to deny the same protection to other creative professionals... Especially considering how hard it is to make a living as a furniture designer compared to a software developer. (That said, I would definitely vote for shortening copyright terms across the board. Something like 50 years from creation date would be fine IMO. These "X years after death" provisions are ridiculous because they only serve to make payouts to descendants that didn't participate in the original creative work.)
- clavalle 10y ago
  Fifty years? I think 10 is more than enough. Maybe 15.
- drdaeman 10y ago
  > IP protection is part of what keeps you paid For worse or better, I think that's not that that true anymore in today's SaaS-ish world, like it used to be in 90's or early 00's.
- Ace17 10y ago
  > if you work in the software industry today, IP protection is part of what keeps you paid What about software people working at Google, Facebook, Amazon, and virtually any other online service?
  - pavlov 10y ago
    Google, Facebook and Amazon own plenty of copyrights and patents. I don't see them campaigning to eliminate IP law. Even though the corporations release a lot of open source, they probably prefer the current status quo of explicit licenses placed on code they choose to release, rather than an alternative world of all code being in public domain. I don't see how it would be to Google's advantage if source code had no IP status at all: an ex-employee could keep a copy of the Google source tree and legally put it on Github.
- jordigh 10y ago
  > If you work in the software industry today, IP protection is part of what keeps you paid, I work in a company that does assessments for other companies. I write in-house software to perform those assessments. They give us the data and we give them reports. There's no "IP" [sic] involved in any of this. There are service contracts and so forth, but my salary would come just as well if our customers had our source code (not that any of them would know what to do with it). Our company provides a service in the form of trained professionals who know how to perform the assessment aided by the software written by people like me who do it. I guess maybe our brand name is important, so perhaps trademarks help us, but that's a completely separate matter from what you are blanket calling "IP". We do not rely on patents (design or not) or copyright to get our pay.
  - collyw 10y ago
    I bet a lot of companies values would go down if the saw the general shoddiness of code in our industry.

jordigh 10y ago

So, I just went to Wikipedia to try to understand design patents. They differ from copyright in that to defend them in court, you don't have to prove that the infringing item was copied from your design, right? (Their terms are also much shorter than copyright, but historically both patents and copyright were no longer than at most a couple of decades.) What's the societal purpose of design patents? I get the purpose of utility patents: tell us how you did it, and in exchange we promise not to compete with you for a while. Utility patents are an alternative to trade secrets. But with a design patent, what is society getting in exchange? Giving designers more of an incentive to produce original designs? Does originality suffer without it? I guess now that copyright is going to cover furniture, the difference is that the term is ridiculously longer (effectively indefinite), but designers also have to prove that there was deliberate copying if they want to sue for infringement?

toyg 10y ago
> what is society getting in exchange? Not closing all existing creative businesses in developed countries, which would otherwise be completely unprotected against the knock-off industry from countries where manufacturing is extra-cheap.
- morsch 10y ago
  Can't be that great at creating if they're still depending on decades old designs.
  - visarga 10y ago
    Well, now they will have to be more creative, and the law works both ways, their designs will also be protected. So everyone will have slightly or more different designs, just for the sake of being different.
  - toyg 10y ago
    Nobody said otherwise, but they do provide employment and profit for the highly-skilled. This development fits the "market of ideas" vision that developed countries have pushed ever since they lost manufacturing superiority to Asian countries. It's an overall attempt at maintaining some sort of upper hand in the commercial sector. Expect copyright and patent laws to be tweaked to cover more and more sectors - already they have been successfully leveraged in the food industry, for example, with "protected origin" programs. The unfortunate side-effect is that we're edging closer and closer towards thoughtcrime: if the objects of crime are ideas, the agents to police must be minds.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

carlob 10y ago

So http://voga.com http://voga.com is dead?

aswerty 10y ago
From my understanding of it, yes.

pmontra 10y ago

I wonder who's being affected by this law. Very few people buy designer furniture costing thousands of Euros. Furthermore you can have 100,000 songs, 1,000 movies, 100 clothes but only a few chairs. So the Chinese will keep selling cheap furniture with some changes to the design and the EU manufacturers won't make much more. Example This chair is extremely popular in cheap restaurants, plastic made https://dearchiworld.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/no-14-chair-michael-thonet/ https://dearchiworld.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/no-14-chair-mi... The Thonet company still sells it (couldn't find the price) and I found it on Alibaba starting from $25. It's so old that's out of the reach of the law but if it wasn't do we really think they're not going to tweak the design and that their EU customers will care and go buying from Thonet instead?

toyg 10y ago
If cheap manufacturers were forced to significantly tweak the design, it would become easier to spot a fake, which means expensive restaurants would more willingly pay the difference to get originals. If everyone could just slap the same glowing apple on their laptop lid, there would be less incentive for people to get original Apple laptops. Same here.
- VLM 10y ago
  "it would become easier to spot a fake" For a theoretical example look at the situation with Wooton desks and their multiple trim levels. They'll just be more trim levels to work around the copyright. Obviously the specific example of Wooton desks don't matter because that design is about 150 years old. But it is an example of a general class of problem. In my infinite spare time I enjoy fine carpentry for relaxation, as do a couple other people here, and on my infinite list of things to do is make either a copy of a Wooton or make a Wooton / 43 folders mashup. And running off extra copies doesn't take much extra time, and selling extra copies is an interesting way to pay for your supplies. So this kind of thing could theoretically impact small craftsmen not just Chinese factories.
  - toyg 10y ago
    > They'll just be more trim levels to work around the copyright. Which is why there are judges and court cases to decide if design patents are infringed, otherwise we'd have machines that simply compare pictures. If your desk is exactly the same as the original bar a few trim levels, a judge will likely find you're infringing. > So this kind of thing could theoretically impact small craftsmen not just Chinese factories. That's entirely possible, but not a new phenomenon. Can small craftsmen make and sell statues of Han Solo without infringing Disney's copyright?

scholia 10y ago

From the Guardian story at https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jul/29/buy-design-classic-now-about-to-rocket-in-price-copyright-law https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jul/29/buy-design-cla... "Take, for example, the famous Eames walnut and leather armchair with matching ottoman. The officially licensed and copyrighted producer, Vitra, sells them for £6,814 in John Lewis. Yet copies made in Chinese factories sell over the internet and in some stores for as little as £399." Later: "With an estimated 54 factories in China making Eames furniture alone, he [David Woods, a copyright laywer] predicts the closure of websites producing bargain basement, mass-produced copies of furniture, 'as after all, this was their business model'."

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

japs 10y ago

As a person who values good design (and has spent what many would think way too much for a table lamp), I don't see this law as totally absurd: they are basically putting design and works of art (think paintings, pictures, novels) on the same level. The real problem is that copyright law is flawed, and terms should be reduced, both for designs and for works of art.

EdHominem 10y ago
In art the only thing that matters is the presentation so there's no societal need for me to copy your art because it serves no function. But with something like a lamp (or chair) the presentation is also the function. If you're the first person to put a switch on the lamp as opposed to the cable, simply because you're the first to source a good enough switch to survive in that form factor, do you deserve protection for that cost/benefit tradeoff? For a century? And doesn't that penalize the switch maker? They do all the work and you're merely the first to slap it on your design so you claim exclusive right to use it, destroying their market for their product.

MistahKoala 10y ago

"This change means that people will be prohibited from using 3D printing and other maker technologies to manufacture such objects, and that for a full century." Undermining the premise of an argument in the first paragraph with a complete mistruth doesn't bode well for the ground it's built on. To say that this change will prevent makers from using 3D printing to produce furniture is significantly more absurd than the idea of protecting makers' own designs from unscrupulous exploitation by manufacturers.

pjc50 10y ago
> this change will prevent makers from using 3D printing to produce furniture Surely that's (part of) the intent of the change?
- MistahKoala 10y ago
  It won't stop them from using 3D printing to produce furniture, though. It's absurd for the article to say that it will as the only thing it's intended to prevent is protected designs being ripped off. If someone wants to design their own furniture, they'll still be free to do that, as well as make it freely available if they wish.

SubiculumCode 10y ago

ah the rentier economy.

mlinksva 10y ago

Anyone have a link to the EU ruling? I read the Guardian article this blog post riffs on yesterday, searched for ruling, and couldn't find.

gulpahum 10y ago

Laws about making copies for private use differ from EU country to another. The author is only talking about UK, which has strict laws about copying for private use. For instance, it is illegal to copy CDs [1] or entire books [2] for private use in UK. In Finland, it is legal to copy CDs (even the ones in public libraries!) [3] and entire books [4] for private use. So, I don't think that 3D printing of furniture is affected in Finland. I can happily continue printing my Ikea chairs. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/12021607/Why-in-2015-is-ripping-CDs-still-illegal-in-the-UK.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/12021607/Why-in-2... [2] https://www.reading.ac.uk/library/finding-info/copyright/lib-copyright-photocopying.aspx https://www.reading.ac.uk/library/finding-info/copyright/lib... [3] http://www.kysy.fi/en/kysymys/it-helsinki-city-library-legal-copy-cds-and-dvds http://www.kysy.fi/en/kysymys/it-helsinki-city-library-legal... [4] http://blogs.helsinki.fi/copyright-within-teaching/exceptions/private-use/ http://blogs.helsinki.fi/copyright-within-teaching/exception...

ashitlerferad 10y ago

I for one look forward to IKEA violating the GPL on copylefted furniture designs.