Copyright for Couture

Fashion design in America has never been covered by the extensive intellectual property (IP) protections afforded to other categories of creative works or to the art in other countries. As a result, America has become a safe haven for design pirates. Piracy disproportionately harms young designers who do not have established trademarks for their brands and must rely purely on creativity to propel their designs into the market. H.R. 2511 is a bill that aims to extend copyright protection to fashion designs, albeit narrowly. Compared with previous proposals to extend effective IP protection to fashion design, H.R. 2511 is more of a sui generis protection aimed at the particularities of the fashion industry. It was the result of intensive negotiations between parties of conflicting interests, and has been tailored to address specific yet ubiquitous problems in the fashion industry

Interrogating copyright history

An understanding of the past – how we got to where we are today – informs the approach of much recent scholarship about copyright. The EIPR is no exception: in an article published in 2003, one co-author of this article (Ronan Deazley) argued that the interpretation of aspects of eighteenth century copyright history – the ruling of the House of Lords in Donaldson v Becket in 1774 – had implications for twenty-first century policy-making and judicial reasoning. This interest in the past has been traced to a ‘historical turn’ in scholarship in the late 1990s, which marked a move away from the more forward-looking approach of the earlier twentieth century, when lawyers had little time for historical perspectives. The climate of renewed scholarly interest in copyright history in recent decades, amongst other things, has seen the launch in 2008 of the AHRC funded digital archive of Primary Sources on Copyright History (hosted at www.copyrighthistory.org), now expanded to cover seven jurisdictions (Italy, UK, USA, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands), as well as the founding of the International Society for the History and Theory of IP (or ‘ISHTIP’) which will see its 8th annual workshop in July 2016. That both initiatives are linked to CREATe (and so to both co-authors ), the RCUK-funded centre for research into copyright, the creative economy, and the future of creative production in the digital age, illustrates well a current perception that a study of the past is of value to those researching the present