5 ms·

Freedom In Fashion: No IP, No Patents, No Licensing

53 points by nalbyuites 16y ago

bmunro 16y ago
The comments for this video are a lot more intelligent than usually found on Youtube.
tuxychandru 16y ago
I'm not a big proponent of IP in general. However, I feel comparing a creation which can be converted to a digital form to one which cannot doesn't make much sense. In the industries with top 3 sales showed in the video (Food, Auto and fashion), the product cannot be transfered to another person without losing your won possession. Even if you copy a design you still must manufacture the apparel. Even if you copy the design of a car you still must manufacture it. However, that's not the case with software, music or movie transferred over the internet. You don't have to re-write a software to share a verbatim copy. You don't have to direct and shoot the whole movie again to make a copy of it.
- sambeau 16y ago
  It will be interesting to see what happens when we finally have replicators
  - kiba 16y ago
    Thingiverse community + Makerbot Inc. versus The Lone Inventor with a patent? I'll root for thingiverse people anytime. Nothing ruin the party more than a jackass telling people not to invent, design, and engineer, and make a living.
- binarray2000 16y ago
  Two points: 1. Yes, the "products" of the three industries (Films, Books, Music) with low(er) sales are transferable. But that has only become the case in the last 10-15 years. Prior to that it was harder (with movies and music: both being distributed on different media) or even impossible (books: being distributed on paper only; not counting audio-books) to separate content and media. Yet, over decades these industries have done everything to protect themselves. 2. If you try to copy the way some software works (by re-writing it) you can get sued. Damocles sword is always hanging above your head.
sambeau 16y ago
I've often wondered about Chefs in this respect, too. While it seems really unfair that the guy who 'invented' Bannoffee Pie never made his fortune from it it has generally been of benefit to society as: a) we can all eat Bannoffe pie as anyone can make it and b) it doesn't appear to stifle the creation of new recipes. Plus if there had been IP protection for the creation of Bannoffee pie I seem fairly sure that the Chef would never have seen any benefit - just the owner of the restaurant and whichever chain store or supermarket he eventually sold the IP to.
- mikecarlucci 16y ago
  Plus with cooking it can be possible to hide a secret ingredient/cooking technique with trade secret protection. Look how far Coca Cola has come without ever giving up their exact formula. We have many varieties of "cola" to choose from, but still only one Coke.
  - sambeau 16y ago
    I was taken by the idea that when anyone can broadly copy anyone else, the details become more important. Without copy-protection companies would take the time to get the details right rather than protect their IP and sit on their laurels. We would get fewer big leaps but a lot more iteration. Drug companies would be constantly trying to release products that are 1 or 2% better than the last one. I suspect that this would work in society's favour.
    - kiba 16y ago
      It is my opinion that people won't start copying until you become profitable, or at least popular. People can't just copy whatever people come up with, because lot of these ideas will fail. So they will try to copy successful models/products. The only problem is, if they wait too long, they will lose most of the potential profits. That's called the first mover advantage and I believe it to be sufficient incentives.(Because ya simply got there first, before anybody else, therefore you get looot of money!) Sometime people also just never got around to copying you. This is especially true in my experience. My website once got a huge traffic spike from digg one time. Despite the overwhelming traffic, nobody ever forked my site despite its liberal copyright policies. Heck, the first mover advantages apply to the American publishing industry centuries ago, when there is no recognition of foreign copyright. In some cases, the British authors actually earn more from their sale of manuscript to American publisher(so they can be first), than they do from royalties in their own country.
Charuru 16y ago
Though I don't know much about fashion, I can't help but think that the investment required to think up of a new fashion design must pale in comparison to the investment required for innovation in other industries. Perhaps years to write a book, millions to shoot a movie, millions to design a chip. That probably makes all the difference in terms whether or not IP is a socially beneficial system.
- sambeau 16y ago
  Although, as she pointed out, this argument doesn't work for car design
  - eagleal 16y ago
    You don't buy cars only for their designs. The engine which really is part of what makes the difference (the other one being manufacture material) is patented. And the GPS system (eg. your Navigator), electronic/computer board, and all this things that make you buy a Mercedes instead of a Hyundai, are patented or at least protected by IP. Again she is comparing the "appearance" of the utilitarian market, not the engineering part of it. (You can patent and reinforce a new material for t-shirts which is unbreakable).
    - zebra 16y ago
      If you are a girl from the Carrie Bradshaw cult it is highly possible that you are buying specific car because you like its color.
    - lutorm 16y ago
      You don't buy cars only for their designs. Oh I disagree. I think designs matter a lot more to a large fraction of people than you might think. I think luxury cars have much in common with fashion, in the sense that people who would buy a Mercedes would never buy a Hyundai even if it had all those identical IP in it. Once you get above midrange (ie Toyota), a car is much more about status symbols and conspicuous consumption than features. Just like fashion.
sambeau 16y ago
I suspect that, had the car industry been encumbered with IP we would have been driving Model-T's for a lot longer than we did.
- anamax 16y ago
  The early car industry had lots of patents and patent fights. The guy who invented working intermittent wipers was an independent. The big three refused to pay but used it. There's currently a case involving a safety device for saws. Home Depot installed it and their injury costs went down by $1M/year. They refuse to pay royalties.
  - itgoon 16y ago
    The Home Depot case has been resolved in the little guy's favor: http://blogs.findlaw.com/decided/2010/05/unkindest-cut-home-depot-pays-25-mill-for-safe-hands.html http://blogs.findlaw.com/decided/2010/05/unkindest-cut-home-...
- retube 16y ago
  take a look at how many patents Mercedes will have in their latest models.
mmphosis 16y ago
http://www.neilpoulton.com/ http://www.neilpoulton.com/
motters 16y ago
The claim that open source doesn't have copyrights tends to cast her other claims into doubt. But in principle it would be great if there were no copyrights or patents in software. It would mean fewer things to worry about, and a whole category of grief would disappear. Fashion is not exactly analogous to software though, because in fashion there are physical atoms which are difficult to copy and move around.
mgw 16y ago
This is an amazing slide: http://imgur.com/MbIuc.png http://imgur.com/MbIuc.png
- mustpax 16y ago
  Maybe the causality works the other way around. The collective pie is so much smaller in the high-IP industries, people try to hold on to their share of it with much more ferocity (i.e. more lawyers).
- retube 16y ago
  Hmmm. I would have thought automobiles was very high IP. No reference, but don't VW or Audi hold more patents than any other company in the world or something? Or take consumer goods. Unilver, Sony etc submit 100s of 1000s of patents every year. Anyway, that aside, even if this chart is correct, a correlation does not imply any kind of causation. There many be any number of reasons why Food has more money spent on it (perhaps because we need food to survive and music consumption is purely discretionary?)
  - lutorm 16y ago
    Yeah the automobile industry has patents, it sounded like she was talking more about the design aspect.
- lutorm 16y ago
  I wonder how different it would look if it wasn't gross sales but net profit.

53 points by nalbyuites 16y ago

The comments for this video are a lot more intelligent than usually found on Youtube.

I'm not a big proponent of IP in general. However, I feel comparing a creation which can be converted to a digital form to one which cannot doesn't make much sense. In the industries with top 3 sales showed in the video (Food, Auto and fashion), the product cannot be transfered to another person without losing your won possession. Even if you copy a design you still must manufacture the apparel. Even if you copy the design of a car you still must manufacture it. However, that's not the case with software, music or movie transferred over the internet. You don't have to re-write a software to share a verbatim copy. You don't have to direct and shoot the whole movie again to make a copy of it.

sambeau 16y ago
It will be interesting to see what happens when we finally have replicators
- kiba 16y ago
  Thingiverse community + Makerbot Inc. versus The Lone Inventor with a patent? I'll root for thingiverse people anytime. Nothing ruin the party more than a jackass telling people not to invent, design, and engineer, and make a living.
binarray2000 16y ago
Two points: 1. Yes, the "products" of the three industries (Films, Books, Music) with low(er) sales are transferable. But that has only become the case in the last 10-15 years. Prior to that it was harder (with movies and music: both being distributed on different media) or even impossible (books: being distributed on paper only; not counting audio-books) to separate content and media. Yet, over decades these industries have done everything to protect themselves. 2. If you try to copy the way some software works (by re-writing it) you can get sued. Damocles sword is always hanging above your head.

sambeau 16y ago

I've often wondered about Chefs in this respect, too. While it seems really unfair that the guy who 'invented' Bannoffee Pie never made his fortune from it it has generally been of benefit to society as: a) we can all eat Bannoffe pie as anyone can make it and b) it doesn't appear to stifle the creation of new recipes. Plus if there had been IP protection for the creation of Bannoffee pie I seem fairly sure that the Chef would never have seen any benefit - just the owner of the restaurant and whichever chain store or supermarket he eventually sold the IP to.

mikecarlucci 16y ago
Plus with cooking it can be possible to hide a secret ingredient/cooking technique with trade secret protection. Look how far Coca Cola has come without ever giving up their exact formula. We have many varieties of "cola" to choose from, but still only one Coke.
- sambeau 16y ago
  I was taken by the idea that when anyone can broadly copy anyone else, the details become more important. Without copy-protection companies would take the time to get the details right rather than protect their IP and sit on their laurels. We would get fewer big leaps but a lot more iteration. Drug companies would be constantly trying to release products that are 1 or 2% better than the last one. I suspect that this would work in society's favour.
  - kiba 16y ago
    It is my opinion that people won't start copying until you become profitable, or at least popular. People can't just copy whatever people come up with, because lot of these ideas will fail. So they will try to copy successful models/products. The only problem is, if they wait too long, they will lose most of the potential profits. That's called the first mover advantage and I believe it to be sufficient incentives.(Because ya simply got there first, before anybody else, therefore you get looot of money!) Sometime people also just never got around to copying you. This is especially true in my experience. My website once got a huge traffic spike from digg one time. Despite the overwhelming traffic, nobody ever forked my site despite its liberal copyright policies. Heck, the first mover advantages apply to the American publishing industry centuries ago, when there is no recognition of foreign copyright. In some cases, the British authors actually earn more from their sale of manuscript to American publisher(so they can be first), than they do from royalties in their own country.

Charuru 16y ago

Though I don't know much about fashion, I can't help but think that the investment required to think up of a new fashion design must pale in comparison to the investment required for innovation in other industries. Perhaps years to write a book, millions to shoot a movie, millions to design a chip. That probably makes all the difference in terms whether or not IP is a socially beneficial system.

sambeau 16y ago
Although, as she pointed out, this argument doesn't work for car design
- eagleal 16y ago
  You don't buy cars only for their designs. The engine which really is part of what makes the difference (the other one being manufacture material) is patented. And the GPS system (eg. your Navigator), electronic/computer board, and all this things that make you buy a Mercedes instead of a Hyundai, are patented or at least protected by IP. Again she is comparing the "appearance" of the utilitarian market, not the engineering part of it. (You can patent and reinforce a new material for t-shirts which is unbreakable).
  - zebra 16y ago
    If you are a girl from the Carrie Bradshaw cult it is highly possible that you are buying specific car because you like its color.
  - lutorm 16y ago
    You don't buy cars only for their designs. Oh I disagree. I think designs matter a lot more to a large fraction of people than you might think. I think luxury cars have much in common with fashion, in the sense that people who would buy a Mercedes would never buy a Hyundai even if it had all those identical IP in it. Once you get above midrange (ie Toyota), a car is much more about status symbols and conspicuous consumption than features. Just like fashion.

sambeau 16y ago

I suspect that, had the car industry been encumbered with IP we would have been driving Model-T's for a lot longer than we did.

anamax 16y ago
The early car industry had lots of patents and patent fights. The guy who invented working intermittent wipers was an independent. The big three refused to pay but used it. There's currently a case involving a safety device for saws. Home Depot installed it and their injury costs went down by $1M/year. They refuse to pay royalties.
- itgoon 16y ago
  The Home Depot case has been resolved in the little guy's favor: http://blogs.findlaw.com/decided/2010/05/unkindest-cut-home-depot-pays-25-mill-for-safe-hands.html http://blogs.findlaw.com/decided/2010/05/unkindest-cut-home-...
retube 16y ago
take a look at how many patents Mercedes will have in their latest models.

mmphosis 16y ago

http://www.neilpoulton.com/ http://www.neilpoulton.com/

motters 16y ago

The claim that open source doesn't have copyrights tends to cast her other claims into doubt. But in principle it would be great if there were no copyrights or patents in software. It would mean fewer things to worry about, and a whole category of grief would disappear. Fashion is not exactly analogous to software though, because in fashion there are physical atoms which are difficult to copy and move around.

mgw 16y ago

This is an amazing slide: http://imgur.com/MbIuc.png http://imgur.com/MbIuc.png

mustpax 16y ago
Maybe the causality works the other way around. The collective pie is so much smaller in the high-IP industries, people try to hold on to their share of it with much more ferocity (i.e. more lawyers).
retube 16y ago
Hmmm. I would have thought automobiles was very high IP. No reference, but don't VW or Audi hold more patents than any other company in the world or something? Or take consumer goods. Unilver, Sony etc submit 100s of 1000s of patents every year. Anyway, that aside, even if this chart is correct, a correlation does not imply any kind of causation. There many be any number of reasons why Food has more money spent on it (perhaps because we need food to survive and music consumption is purely discretionary?)
- lutorm 16y ago
  Yeah the automobile industry has patents, it sounded like she was talking more about the design aspect.
lutorm 16y ago
I wonder how different it would look if it wasn't gross sales but net profit.