You thought we wouldn’t notice…
Print Liberation and co. have been making some noise lately about people ripping off their shirts, which frequently are typography-based, just a few words in a particular font arranged nicely on a shirt. Clearly, comparing the two shirts above (left: some German seller on spreadshirt.net, right: Print Liberation), they’ve been ripped off.
But given how difficult it is for designers (ones who actually design garments rather than silkscreening words on a T-shirt) to get any legal satisfaction when ripped off by Forever 21 under current copyright law, I’m curious as to how successfully they’d be able to defend the copyright of a phrase/layout.
Ditto here, except they randomly found this one in real life, at a store in Jersey called Against All Odds. It doesn’t look like Print Liberation’s doing anything about the knockoffs (I mean, besides calling them out on facebook, which kind of doesn’t count), but it’s theoretically an interesting copyright case.
Then again, it’s likely that there wouldn’t be an actual fight if they took any sort of legal action: at least based on Print Liberation’s own behavior when they got in trouble with Sony a few weeks ago over using the Thriller cover shot on a Michael Jackson T-shirt, they’d just get rid of the design if leaned on.
For more fun examples of blatant copyright infringement, check out You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice.
Is Forever 21 the fashion industry’s Napster?
Bottom row: Trovata originals. Top row: Forever 21 knockoffs.
So I think we all realize that disposable-fashion stores like Forever 21 are not able to have such a blindingly fast-changing lineup of stuff (they change out the inventory every few weeks) not because they have a gave infinite monkeys infinite muslin and are manufacturing the best of the results. Neither is it because they’ve got the world’s best designers locked in a basement somewhere churning out hundreds of new patterns a day.
Nope, they pretty openly watch the catwalks during fashion weeks, then turn around a $30 version of that Rodarte dress in six weeks or fewer, often before the original design has gone into mass production.