Surely the MPAA and the RIAA will go to bat for the artists and stamp out this piracy, right?
Silly artist, Copyright lawsuits are for big corporations.
It seems that some good has already come of this. West Elm has decided to drop Cody Foster’s products: http://blog.westelm.com/2013/10/17/we-love-authenticity/
Brown says that she even has records of a woman named Diane
Foster–the same name as Cody Foster’s mother and the woman listed in
state filings as the vice president of Cody Foster & Co.–purchasing
one of her designs off of Etsy and having it shipped to Cody Foster’s
headquarters in Valentine, NE, back in 2009.
So, sociopathic behavior is potentially hereditary.
I don’t buy it, the MPAA and RIAA have spent the last 15 years telling us all that just because you admit you were distributing copyrighted materials and promise to stop doesn’t mean you’re not liable.
It’s pretty much crap that corporations get to call down the wrath of god when an average joe does something wrong, but when it’s the corporation at fault? “Oh whoopsie our bad, can’t we all just get along and forget this PR disaster happened pretty please?” is what we get.
According to Picasso, Cody Foster & Company, aren’t just good artists, they’re great artists.
Good artists copy;
great artists banana.
(stolen, in parts, from bOINGbOING)
Copying designs is difficult to litigate, but it seems like copying an artist’s signature could be grounds for a trademark infringement suit.
You’d still have to do the calculus of whether you’d get enough out of the suit to cover the costs, of course.
They’d have to actually have a trademark for that.
Might be a violation of the Visual Artist’s Rights Act, though.
It blows my mind to see how blatant theft like this is becoming. I was equally shocked to learn how expensive prosecution can be. We really need to contact our congressmen and senators to get the law changed. Common Law Copyright should include a multiplier for damages and legal fees. There doesn’t need to be much of a multiplier, but the pain resulting from theft of intellectual property should be higher than the profit from that theft. There are so many good ideas out there that none of us have actually thought of yet. These companies should invest in their own creativity rather than farm small artisan’s hard work into a pirate knock off…
There’s a huge difference between taking a thing and mixing in some of your own ideas before passing it on, and just straight-up ripping something off.
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