 I have a company called Radar Research with my business partner, Aaron, who I'm going to talk about here tonight. And now, 2003, we found ourselves coincidentally after working together many years in New York at USC together, getting advanced degrees. So we were approached at the moment in their center, which is a think tank, an entertainment-related think tank in California related to USC. About producing some research focused on fashion and copyright, Aaron has spent many years looking at music. And we wanted to take a look at music and fashion. And how both of these industries, one being a copyright maximalist, the other being a copyright minimalist, how they relate to each other in terms of the creative process, but also how they differ in terms of the legal structure and the organizational structure of those two industries. So we produced this research that's published by the New York Center. And Aaron and I have spent a lot of time working together again after all those years that we started a company called Radar Research. And we consult with a variety of corporations. So that's how I ended up here talking about this topic. And I wanted to, yeah, me, apparently, Aaron was assigned to it and I was required to read any of his classes to his students. So we, I wanted to start off with a very, very correct presentation just because I know everyone in this room is very familiar with the very recent copyright law. But I'm thinking maybe not as familiar with how fashion works. So I just wanted to use some background and some context to start off the conversation. So basically what we've seen is that fashion has historically been designed to copyright protection and there's a couple of reasons for this. So it's one of the reasons, let's look at it historically. And I'm only gonna start from the 18th century. Pretty much ever since, you know, man took off his loincloth and put on something else. Fashion has been used to signify a number of social signifiers. Class, gender, position, hierarchy, religion. And you know, in the Middle Ages, if someone took a nobleman's livery, they were forced to wear this coat of arms in colors. Sumptuary laws in the Elizabethan age actually presented people from wearing the clothes of nobleman. They believed that the entire moral fabric of society would be rendered as thunder if the lower classes were wearing a clothing of the upper classes. So there's a lot of law that happened before the mid-18th century. By the mid-18th century, we had a writing of a class that could suddenly afford to buy fashion. We also had changes in textile technology. So mass production became closer to reality. In the mid-19th century, we had the House of Work, which we found it, which was essentially the first couturier, the first time that a designer, an individual, was associated with a creative product in fashion. Towards the end of the 19th century, you have mass production, which meant that middle class could buy essentially knockoffs of high-end couture. In the beginning of the 20th century, we had what were considered authorized and unauthorized production, being sold in the U.S., mainly through catalogs, a serious catalog, things like that. So we had this democratization starting to happen in the early 20th century. And we also had what we think of as the high-end of fashion become established. So Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga, all these names that we're still familiar with today were founded in the 20th century. Around 1933, there was this first attempt to really protect fashion in an organized way, and that was with the fashion originators' field of America. It basically required registrations or designs. Manufacturers had to abide by this, or they were blacklisted essentially, and the FTCs got in and said, this is illegal. This is a violation of antitrust. And by 1941, in the Supreme Court case, the fashion originators' field was dead. And then things kind of progressed along until the 1960s, and that was really where we hit a watershed moment in fashion. We had Hollywood, we had rock and roll, we had youth culture. We had all these cultural factors, something like taking over in a way that fashion was no longer a top-down. It wasn't designers in Paris or New York or Milan telling everybody what they should wear. Suddenly, the kids were all right. They knew you had this bottom-up direction for fashion, where designers were taking inspiration from the street and from kids who didn't care what designers were telling them to do anymore. And so you had this destabilization of couture, and you also had an industry that is highly stratified, but also highly diverse. It's not an oligopoly in a way that you find in other culture industries like music and movies. You have a lot of large designers, a lot of small designers, and it's an incredibly non-monopolistic industry. What that has led to is a lot of copying, a lot of knockoffs, and sometimes counterfeiting. And to address that, some of the higher-end designers have really been pushing legislation to have copyright. They have historically been protected through patents and trademark, but not copyright. And one of the main reasons for this is that fashion is considered utilitarian. It's considered functional, and functional objects in the U.S. aren't really afforded copyright protection in the same way that art or sculpture or... weirdly, the design of boats are protected in the U.S. So from 2006 on, you have multiple legislative attempts to protect copyright, and I know we're going to get into that in the discussion. But the picture says a thousand words, right? So this is probably one of the most famous examples of copying. Basically, the head designer, Glanciaga Nicholas Castillar, probably put her in his name, and I believe it was 2002, produced a vest that's the one on your right that was almost an exact knockoff of a vest designed by my man, Kai Tung Wang. He was a fashion designer and second sister. He was of tiny American descent, and he had died about a decade earlier of age-related disease. So I'm only going to bring that up because there was no one around to steal. He pretty much had license, even if it was not technically illegal. There was no...he thought...well, we don't really know what he thought, but... there wasn't a state, really, to assume that before you went after your dead Chinese-American designer. And it's almost a, you know, stitched by stitched replica of this vest. When he was found out, he was pretty offended at it. His response was, I did it, yes. And not only that, I'm very excited that people are looking for my sources of inspiration. He was not apologetic at all. He was actually quite clouted that people were actually investigating where he was getting his ideas from. When I was working on the research we were producing, we went to a man named Cameron Silver who owns a high-end vintage boutique in Los Angeles called Decades. When you see celebrities on the red carpet or at the Oscars wearing a 1930s couture dress, it usually comes from Canada. This is the man who knows his fashion. And when we talk about it, instead of the incident, it doesn't die. When Yeskia passes away, he's a vitreur who will mention two things. The bag he designed is a very famous Balenciaga bag that they are very litigious about protecting. And the kitesic scandal doesn't mean that he's not going to do it again. On your left is a vest jacket, a leather jacket that was produced by a company in the 1960s called East West Music Instruments, I believe is the name. And they were famous for producing these sort of rock and roll jackets for Janis Joughlin and a couple others. They go on eBay for anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000. But the company is out of business now. Again, there's no one there to sue. And in the middle there you have his version of it, which then got replicated by Urban Outfitters for about a $300 price point and sold out very quickly. So you have that continuum there of this vintage jacket into high-end down to the low-end. Both of which sold out. And we see it happening again and again and again. This is my first and hopefully not my last presentation I could see other that talks about Jessica Simpson, but she has a very successful shoe line. And you'll see here, it's almost, you know, a sapphire up above, a crystal and baton shoe. Her retail for, you know, about a hundred bucks. Her retail for probably about a thousand bucks. Obamka Trump. I love that it's always like non-celebrities have shoe clients. But she had a shoe a few years ago that was very similar to a Derek Lam shoe. Again, almost stitched by stitch. Kate Middleton. Everyone was, you know, so in love with her wedding dress. Until they found out that it looked very, very similar to a wedding dress by, worn by women in Isabella Orsini, who's Italian royalty, two years earlier. So these are very, very similar dresses. Another famous case. Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Louboutin are embroiled in a legal battle over the red sole. The sole of Louboutin's company is that red sole underneath the shoe. It's an instantly identifiable signifier of Christian Louboutin and he is claiming that he owns that color. That red belongs to him. And I think that... Is that trademark issue? Yeah, probably... He has to trademark this little thing. Scares me. It's more of a trial. I think the trial is over and they're deciding... They're deciding who wins here. Who owns red? And then we have another trial that's going on right now. It's Gucci vs. Guess, where Gucci is claiming that guesses shoes way too similar with their interlocking Gs, as well as the patterns and style here. So Robert doesn't let the panel and Gs themselves read things. He'll play them next time. But just a few things that we do want to think about. You know, is there a need for protection in this industry? If there is kind of balance to be struck between the need for protection and the desire to allow an industry to continue to thrive creatively, because this is an industry that hasn't really been hurt too much by a lack of copyright. And then, you know, what does make fashion a new form of cultural production that makes it just similar from the music or media journalism that we talked about earlier? And are there lessons that we can learn from what's happened in fashion and both the industry as well as the community, because those are two different things and we're talking about fashion. Can other creative industries learn from them? So I'm going to let Katie introduce herself, and then also we'll get into some of these questions. So I already introduced myself essentially when I became a tasker. I work at public knowledge and when we touch on fashion and copyrighted shoes, I tend to be a go-to person. I've been a person following the IDQPA, which I know that Ilse will talk about more in depth. I'm not a lawyer. I do outreach. This is more personal desires getting involved in this because I think that there are a lot of misguided efforts to place copyright on the fashion industry that I think would be a detriment to the fashion industry. And I don't want to see them shoot themselves in the foot. Good afternoon. I came all the way from California to aggregate you as part of our team to prevent any future discussion of IDQPA. I will start by framing what we're doing, but first let me tell you a little bit about the California industry. It's the largest in the country, surpassing an appointment in New York by about 60,000 employees. We do not make red carpet merchandise. So the stuff that you see at the Academy Awards is not made in California. What's made in California is generally what you see in the public domain, what you see in the TV shows, what you see in front of you on the street, what you see in the general retailing world is that which is coming from California. It's usually not brand-mades. We have very few major brands, but we have over 7,000 companies that employ many, many designers, and 85% of what comes through our ports is made elsewhere. So it's not a manufacturing industry as much as it is a service industry, and that goes to New York as well. That's a whole other subject, but that is how fashion works today, and it's called speed there. This is the outline. We're going to define the terminology and then talk about the new bill, and then there are some very, very current trade issues that are coming up. Trademark, patent, copyright, counterfeit, trade press. Anything you see conceivably falls in one of these five categories. Anything you see in the street. Here's your trademark. You know what these companies are. You know who they are. And if you don't and you're wearing something that has this mark on it, and it's not that company, then it's counterfeit. This is a patent. It's very rare that a patent is in the apparel business, because construction, there's nothing new under the sun. Now in this particular case, not your mother's jeans did a crisscross flap and was able to get a patent, but it is very, very rare in the apparel industry. Copyright. Now this is a little bit dicey. There are many, many restrictions of copyright in the apparel industry, and we call it vexatious litigation. You have companies that do not design anything, but they make a screen of a print that is in public domain, copyright it for $40, and then sue anyone who uses it after it's in public domain, a polka dot, a cherry, a daisy. And we have that throughout the industry. It's called vexatious litigation. But copyright refers to the pocket of a jean, not just the trademark. Also something like the Burberry plant is not only a trademark, but it's also a copyright. All those prints that were on the Ed Hardy look that is no longer part of fashion, that's a copyright. Counterfeit is illegal. Counterfeit is an issue with the U.S. Treasury Department, and these are the fakes and the reels, and they usually come from overseas, but that is a company that is going for the look and the trademark that they don't like. Now we get to a very gray area, trade dress. Trade dress is when you're looking at something you know from whom it's derived and it doesn't have a logo. The blue box of Tiffany doesn't need to say Tiffany. The bottle of Coca-Cola doesn't need to say Coca-Cola. And a Chanel jacket, although it may be a knockoff, is still considered a Chanel type jacket. That's trade dress. The problem with the Red Soul fight is that they didn't go for trade dress. And they may lose. Luba team may lose on this one because they didn't go for trade dress and they didn't define the red. They could have defined it as a whole series of colors called pantone colors that you can pick a color number, and you can trademark or use that color as your own, but they didn't do that. And by the way, it's in appeal now. Luba team already lost and it's in appeal. So we get to the new one, a new county heard from. Let me tell you the background of this. Two of Senator Schumer's constituents, Harvey Weinstein and Barry Diller, who are married to designers. Diane Furstenberg, Georgina Chapman of Marquesa decided that they had enough. They were creative geniuses and they found knockoffs. And both men supported Senator Schumer and when public in Women's Retail was saying, we have paid for this bill to be passed. I'd have to quote. The bill will is now in its fifth version. The background is that knockoffs under current law are legal. They are not considered counterfeit. They do not have the label of the originating designers. The proposed law states that a copy to be infringed may be substantially identical. Nobody really knows what the hell that means, but that's what it says. So similar in appearance as to be mistaken for the protected design with a three-year protection. Now mind you, fashion moves at the speed of ten weeks. In ten weeks it's in and it's out. That's the sequence at retail. However, and this is the big however, no registration or copyright for infringement is required. The copyright office has not changed its IT since the 70s. They have no room and no way to take on copyright, copyrights for designer brands. Don't forget, each designer makes over a hundred styles five times a year. Copyright office couldn't handle that. This law says nothing is required. Someone graduating, being graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design can say I did that first and send a letter and the game is on. There is no research available for who said what was copyrighted or what was done first. And garlic design and pattern making has been considered useful, as has been pointed out. Pattern making are useful art. There is just so much you can do to get into it, to make it fit, where are the bosoms, where do you work it, and how do you get it from a size 8 to a size 16. Now costume design is something else. One of a kind while Matthew's on share are not made for public consumption. But when you design a garment you have to make it for public consumption. Here's another useful article. Are we going to be getting a proliferation of lawsuits because the Bentley looks like the Chrysler. And this lawsuit is waiting to happen, as was shown, not only was the countess, I think she's countess, was the headdress, but it happened to have been knocked off. The wedding was April 29th. On May 9th it was knocked off by a British designer, and by May 7th it was on the cover of Women's Wear Daily. It was an accountess, but the funny thing about it is, from 1991, there it is from Brooklyn, from Kleinfelds in Brooklyn. Is that 1991 or 1991? No, 1991. What is original? What is original? And as someone who has been there, historically, I can tell you that nothing is in the way of garment design made from a pattern. Diane von Furstenberg, one of the major proponents of this build, said she created and invented the rat dress. Well, there it is in the 60s. There was hers in 1975. She brought it back in 2009. And yet Clare McCarville had it at 695, which is a sportswear tradition in the 40s. So the rat dress, in its incarnation, how do you say I did it first? Originality? The other designer that testified in Washington as to how much money he lost by having knocked off was Nancy Sora Grievous, who designed the wedding dress for the unfortunate Caroline Kennedy. Unfortunately for him, I then sent a photo along with a bold pattern from the 60s. Now, the dress in and of itself is an original. I love this phrase from Saint Laurent. Over the years, I have learned what is important in a dress is the woman who wears it. The dress is a basic slip dress on the bias. And he whipped that out in Congress and said there were 5,000 copies and I should have had a royalty. And we're saying why? We now have the third proponent in front of Congress, Vera Wang, who has made a trip to every one on the Judiciary Committee saying that her garments should be protected. Her wedding dresses should be protected. However, the new Vera Wang full coals, they had no problem knocking on friends of Shola, Fagli, Misha, and Valentino when they put her brand on shoes and handbags. Where is the substance in all of this? Is she only protected for one garment, one wedding dress, or does she want protection for everything that is in her name? And where is Fagli, Misha's a product of Omar Jacobs' protection in this? This is the process. Lorenzo Shola has just finished testifying in Congress because Target knocked him off, knocked off his bag. And his bag is 1,500 or 1,600 and the Massimo messenger was a problem for him. He brought both garments to Congress. However, the evolution of the Mulberry Alexa Bag from 2003, then you did brands of Shola and then Mulberry is back again in 2010. This is how fashion works. It's back and forth and back and forth. It's called virtualizing. And then what do we do about this, ladies, that we all see while we're having a manager? And the magazines. And there isn't a magazine that doesn't have Can You Stop the Knuckle? Is this going to be illegal? And under the way the law is written, absolutely you'll never see this again, the law passes. So the fundamental flaws of IPPA, it's now IPPA. And the reason the third P is in there is because they put in the word piracy. And they put in the word piracy so that other uninformed legislators would think, oh, we're all against piracy. But this has nothing to do with piracy. This enables designers to claim copyrights over styles that they didn't invent. They don't mean to, but they don't know that it was done before. If Frenchman claims would only target U.S. companies, there is no point in trying to sue Chinese company, Zara, Mango, H&M, Topshop, Benelton. Those are all offshore retailers. There's no point going after them. This would only be targeted against U.S. retailers and U.S. designers. The lending institutions have a problem with this. Because if something gets a letter of infringement, it comes right off the retailer's shelf. It goes right back to the manufacturer. Where's the money? And of course, judges become the arbiters of fashion taste and we've all seen what they wear under the ropes. Not to be defined. So here we have what's happening now. Just to define counterfeit piracy, the three biggest things in counterfeit are music, movies, and brand name clothing. And unfortunately, they have lumped all these three things together in consideration of future loss. However, in the case of counterfeit, 25% of the people who buy it knew it to be illegitimate. They just wanted to wear that brand. And 73% said it's easily available. Here's a situation of real versus fake. The fake of shoe says made in Australia. Ups are made in China. So in order to give it authenticity, they put the made in Australia. And it was caught in ports. And the current actions, and that's the combating online infringement and counterfeit act broke piracy. This is the target of the new bill that was just put down, the SOVA and the PIPA. These kind of websites that actually sell counterfeits. Not replicas, not as seen as, not imitations of, but actually sell counterfeits. One was stop online piracy and the other protect the intellectual property act. And the reason I say show these as part of the fashion statement is because we are concerned that we wind up in this web. Because these will try and come back before Congress as well. So now I want to conclude with another scary new issue for free trade, fair trade, and all of these other issues that you are so vehemently involved in. China has started as of August of last year increasing trade marks. It started with Castel winery, which is a small winery in London, in England. They froze the name because there was another company in China that phonetically had the name Castel. They have now frozen Michael Jordan from being a brand in China because there is a chain of retailers with 5,700 retail stores using Michael Jordan's image. And I can pronounce it, Chao Dan, is the name of the retail stores, Chao Dan with Michael Jordan's image. Now we go to Hermès. They just lost the case. Hermès, that venerable French brand is no longer a brand in China because someone phonetically translated Hermès. Amashí is Hermès. And now, just in ankle, Sheba's Regal. They don't recognize Sheba's Regal because the court said it was not well known in China. So whoever translated Sheba's Regal phonetically into Chinese now can use the Sheba's Regal brand. Go fight City Hall in China. We are very much concerned that this will translate into U.S. brands like Guess, like BCPG, like Land's End, like anything else. So we are telling all our people find your phonetic translation and trademark that fast. Experts agree. There are experts who agree with us. Mark Jacobs says, are you talking about fashion? Lose the word original. Ask any designer where they get their inspiration. They don't sit by a window and let it materialize. It's all about research. And Coco Chanel being copied is the ransom of success. That's the background. So we welcome the discussion and I welcome your questions. Thank you very much. So I know that we're going to be reaching the end for questions, but I actually think in the room this size it would be great to have people come up during a discussion and raise your hand and just let them know that you have a question so that this is more of a discussion and it's interactive and engaging as possible. So if you have a question, just let us know. I want to start off talking a little bit about between our two presentations we've talked a lot about not necessarily a great form of protection for fashion. Is there, are there circumstances where we need more protection for fashion design? And what would those be? Do you want me to make that? Sure. No. In the world of copyright, original art is and should be copy. But there needs to be a major change in the copyright office and they do agree with us that there needs to be a clearer definition of what is original art. Putting Sam on a daisy and being able to declare that as an original copyright print should not be allowed. At this point the copyright office you send in your artwork whether it's on the back of your gene or a print with $35 to the copyright office and you get the copyright. There is no listing there is no visual record no one knows who came before and in the case of two copyrights it's the first post block first to file. So those changes have to be made but should there be any more or should there be copyright or design restrictions on garments that will consume consumption? Yeah and this is the thing that really gets me is that I can see the perspective of fashion designers wanting more protection because there's just that visceral gut reaction of when you pour your heart and soul into this beautiful design and then you see it on the racks that forever till one for ten bucks that sucks and I can understand that but at the same time you can copyright a textile you can copyright your print that you're putting on to a piece of fabric that is copyrightable and that's not questionable Forever 21 does copy your beautiful very original print design that you can put onto a fabric that's copyright violation if it is a straight fabric you also have protection so and not to mention that honestly the person who's going to buy the ten dollar garment at Forever 21 never would have bought your piece and that's the difficulty that I run into is that I can understand the visceral reaction of wanting more protection but I just see so many so much collateral damage that a very well-intentioned well-meaning designers don't realize that they would be doing to themselves so there's been this idea that the lack of copyright and the proliferation of knockoffs actually helps the fashion industry as a whole because it accelerates the cycle of obsolescence forces, in a strange way the origins of copyright in the US were meant to inspire creativity to give ownership over design to motivate artists to continue to create and benefit from those creations and in fashion it works the opposite so there's no copyright so the design that we've made within a matter of weeks or months is already obsolete which forces this increased cycle of innovation. Is there is there any other industry that we can see that or any other situation we can see that dynamic working? Food. Comedy. With something that comes in style or out of style and that's in the food industry that's in the restaurant industry Southwestern is in the Asian fusion is in and suddenly something else is added as act. What we always say to the designers who bemoan the fact that it's in and it's interesting that everybody talks about Forever 21 because H&M, Zara, Mango, Ben Alton, they're all in this of why are we always picking on the American retailers and besides Macy's and JC's then they do it too and target. But the issue is a designer makes 50 to 75 garments a season every 10 weeks to be in front of the buying public the retail buying public and if one of them is knocked off there's a human crime does that mean that that designer is not very good? I mean if your whole line is knocked off then you have an opportunity to say piracy it's a whole other issue but if one out of a hundred is knocked off, first of all as a designer you should own it own that knockoff as just Square said, own the fact that somebody found something in you that was worthy of trend development and maybe they'll come back but if only one out of a hundred is knocked off you're not a very good designer. I'm curious because I believe fashion design because that makes it so wet I was just wondering if you had any comparison between the US industry and the French industry and also I'm curious if any American designers have ever sued in France trying to take protection of the French law? Let me give you an answer to both of those European law has two things that is not in this law one is registration it's called an RCD registered design copyright RDC and not copyright registered certificate so if you want to register your design you can register usually they don't and the other thing is loser pays that's the third rail of American law loser pays if we had loser pays we'd be all for this still because anyone who sues on originality of design wouldn't lose so that's the main big difference between the European law and our law there was a major fight in the 70s and early 80s between Ralph Lauren and again, Yves Saint Laurent Yves Saint Laurent said they did the smoking the black tuxedo the black tuxedo jacket with pants it was called the smoking sued Ralph Lauren for doing a line for line copy in his New York show won in the French court Ralph Lauren then countersued in the US court and we at the same time in the 80s because I think this in front of a major group of students showed Maulina Dietrich in the same after in 1936 so nothing is new yet but very rarely very rarely do these law students proliferate in Europe on fashion because it comes and goes there as well and my understanding with the law in France is also that there's a higher standard for to the kid to be accepted and a lot of designers in France actually ignore the law they don't understand it's not used even the fact that fashion industry is very popular and there's a lot of money being made aren't these basically ego lawsuits or ego laws to try to basically protect the ego of designers, certain designers don't really want to compete in an environment that they know exactly what the environment is before they enter into it and the fact that you have designers like Calvin Klein who probably makes more money off of underwear than he does on the high fashion because he understood that economics is that everybody is going to buy underwear so if I can get 50 cents of $1.50 more on a pack of underwear then I can care less about make or runway in France well basically the money in the business is based on the value of your trademark so it's not based on the value of your copyrights because your copyrights are only worth 10 weeks really I mean no one really is living in a print for 3 years but trademark is the thing that Klein has been out of the business for 7 years and he's making his money on his licensing of his trademark and that could be under shirts or underwear or whatever it is and that's what everybody's going for to make the value of their mark more exclusive better I won't speak to the egos of the people involved but your rights are up to you Hey, Blake Reid from that Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown I wanted to tee up something we just talked about with trademark law and other types of laws we trade dress and other things might end up being really important in terms of your success in the fashion industry but at the same time we've been talking today about the behavior in a lot of these industries so we talked this morning about journalists not being willing to do things that might upset their colleagues I mentioned comedy a minute ago there's a thing that's Joe Rogan calling out Carlos Mencia for stealing everybody's jokes you stop telling your jokes when Robin Williams comes into the room my mom is a big quilter and the quilter talk is a elaborate series of marms about what you're able to copy and what you're not that really have nothing to do with copyright in some ways so I was wondering if you could talk about the need for a law to play a role and the need for norms and how you see that shaping up in fashion in the street that was I'm glad you brought this up because when we were doing our research that was a large part of it it was the idea that any absence of copyright how effective is self-regulation and shame as a motivator we started the case of Balenciaga there wasn't much shame even though he was called out on it and even though the industry as a whole said this isn't right you need to give credit where credit is due there wasn't so much to copy he did it without he got caught he thought he would get away with it he didn't so what we found in the course of doing our research is that there is nothing new under the sun but there are certain patterns or designs that are very much associated with particular designers so Rudy Gromreich who did a plan for the Christian Dior Peplum the idea that you can knock something off you can pay homage as long as you give credit where credit is due if you don't do that that's when that self-regulating shame kicks in where the rest of the industry says no this is not right you need to at least acknowledge what we found so even though he didn't reference the person it becomes a self-regulating mechanism within that industry unless you're not allowed to Chanel twice a year takes out a full page ad in Rubensburg Daily and said we do not allow even the use of the name you can't say Chanel like jacket in a newspaper magazine we love our brand and we appreciate that you love it too but don't use it we'll come and add to you so you can take trademark all the way you can let it proliferate there's a great story that I happen to be privy to I was in China in Macau and this is they have a huge area where junk is all over the place and Oshkosh O'Gosh which was a Wisconsin company out of business for ten years and the biggest brand I saw in China in all the swathes was Oshkosh certainly wasn't done by Wisconsin people but it became so important in China that the company renewed itself in Wisconsin the children of the original owners and it's now a brand again that's how strong a trademark can be when it's just permanently brand in brains and they look at it and that is where we are right now with the internet by the way people are even knocking off American apparel and forever 21 just putting the labels in junk just so it has validity trademarks have become a valid exercise of cash that's what the internet has done be careful you don't know what you're buying and I think going back to the concept of egos and then I'll is that is that if I see a Chanel like jacket even if it's not Chanel and there's nothing written about it saying that it is Chanel like I'm still versed in the language of the fashion industry and I know it's a Chanel inspired jacket there's a sense that really you've become the most successful you can be in the fashion industry if you go when you can say oh this collection was clearly inspired by such and such and such and so you can tell that that really is more than any sort of trademark can offer and any sort of legal framework can apply and create to give that kind of value that the industry and people who follow the industry really speak a language of brands that not a trademark but a brand something feels like it's Chanel or feels like it's the lens gather you know that's why this Louboutin case is going to be such a classic case because it totally counters what's going on right now with trademark this trademark is the red soul okay didn't trademark it tried to trademark it but it's going counter to that right now it's to when we see somebody with a red soul shoe we assume they spend a thousand dollars for that shoe and at the same time if I were to see a shoe with a red soul on it and a department store and it wasn't in the ton I would go and it's trashy and I wouldn't buy that because that's a wrong call maybe I'd still think about it I wonder we think of fashion as sort of a low IP industry and of course at our there's a lot of IP in fashion in an area of low IP industry but I wonder if there are lessons that can be learned from other industries we're talking about regulations and culture or societal norms, whatever we want it to call it, is there something unique about the fashion industry that allows it to function in this way, or is this something that would be possible in other industries but for the existing legal structures? Is this explorable beyond fashion industry, or is fashion a fluke? I'm going to take this one. Okay. So, when we were doing our research, it was a comparison to using fashion. And the bottom line is that fashion as a physical good is, if I'm wearing a hat, you can't wear that same hat. Whereas music is, went from being a physical good, it went from being rival and suitable to non-rival and not suitable. So, if I'm listening to a particular song, it used to be, I was listening to this record, you have to be right next to me, listen to that same exact record. Once everything went digital, that flies out the window. Which is why the music industry is in such a jam right now when it comes to copyright maximalism. If I'm wearing this jacket, you can't wear the same jacket at the same time. And that's where there's that break. Both of those industries have very different organizational, legal, and social structures, but at the end of the day, a physical good versus a virtual good make it very, very difficult to take lessons from the world of fashion and import them directly into the world of music or movies or anything that has essentially become virtual or digital. I wish there was a better answer to that. Maybe you have one, but... Well, one of the things is diversity. There is no more diverse industry of designers than in the world of consumer products. Our industry alone in California, you'd have to translate everything into several languages from Farsi to Korean to Chinese to Japanese to bad English to Spanish. But there's such a diverse amount of designers and consumers of fashion that there's really no way to say what is the moral aspect for one because they take from each other. What is in the Latino community on the salsa dance floor is certainly not in the Korean community where one size fits all. So it's so diverse that it is a problematic situation to say you can't copy me because I'm going for a different customer. I think the issue is the person buying the Forever 21 jacket for $10, the same person is going to buy the Chanel jacket for $1,000 and $4,000. We're talking about it's not the same customer. Music, movies, video games, it probably is the same customer. We're also talking about, within media, a few highly concentrated companies in part of the vast majority of production and revenue and the fashion industry is not like that. It is highly stratified and highly diverse. And a low threshold for entry. Could be the back of your garage. Well, now we're getting a pretty low threshold for entry as well. It's far more democratized today than it was a long time ago, or not even that long ago. But, you know, when we set out to do our research, our question was that are there lessons that those industries take from fashion? And it's a very, very difficult question to answer. You know, we think that there's a lot to be learned from fashion in terms of creating an industry and a community, again, two separate things that are regulated, essentially self-regulated through this mechanism of shame on norms. But, and there is, there probably are parallels within music. You know, you have to give credit where priorities do in terms of sampling or borrowing certain ideas or certain drug lines or certain baselines, certain harmonies and certain melodies. We tend to protect those, actually, and the rhythm. We protect the harmony where we protect the rhythm. But, you know, I, it almost came down to the fact that what does this look like and what does it not look like? They have very different ways of protecting themselves. And I think the way that, knowing the background in Michael's head, how do you work with him, I think that the way this can be applied is with thinking about other industries that don't already have copyright or that have less IP. I think that, especially in Washington, and especially in the reason why we're all gathered here today is to remember the limits and exceptions on copyright. Is that sometimes? There are industries where no copyright is not a big scary thing. I think that there's a tendency to see more copyright is always better, more copyright enforcement is always better. That's the conversation that we're used to having, but we need to start also having a conversation about copyright period, sometimes it's not the answer to everyone's problems and can sometimes cause a lot more damage in the industry. And I think that copyright, or copyrighting fashion is one of the prime examples because it is a rich and diverse and successful and, you know, multi-billion dollar industry that drives a huge portion of the economy and is not, does not have copyright. And I think that that lesson is the main one. Interesting question. I think we're done with questions. Any last ones? No. I want to thank our panelists. Katie, especially for stepping in, for Nora, who couldn't be here today, who did all this, and for Elisa coming all the way from Los Angeles, like me. Thank you.