Technology Blog

Paging boogah!

Interesting situation playing out at Threadless — I think this may be the
first time a stolen design made it through voting and so on, onto cotton,
without being spotted. Here’s the design, supposedly by someone called
‘rocketrobyn’:

And here’s the (apparently original) stencil art by miso and
ghostpatrol:

BTW, note the perspective being copied from the photo’s odd angle, to the shirt design…

The Threadless design’s submission
page has some classic
comments:

• Boney_King_of_Nowhere: Wow. Are you by any chance a fan of Bansky?
  Because this is almost a rip off. Almost. Awsome though.
• rocketrobyn (this is my design): Thank you for the positive comments. I
  really like this shirt too! […] I’m not sure who Bansky [jm:sic] is, but
  I’ll check it out!

Heh.

I heard about this via You Thought We Wouldn’t
Notice, a street-design plagiarism blog, where
ghostpatrol (one of the stencil artists) posted
a blog post
about the situation. In the comments there, Jake from Threadless pipes up:

jake n on 12 Dec 2006 at 4:30 am

hey, jake here from threadless. i was just made aware of this situation and
want to give you all my assurance that we will handle this properly.

the designer will not be paid and the design will either be removed or
licensed from the original designer if they are willing.

give us a couple days to sort the details.

Not to appear whingy, 2 hours later “n.” posts:

The original owners are not willing to license this design to Threadless,
and want it removed from the site.
Neither artist has yet been contacted by Threadless.

Bit of patience there

More links:

• StencilRevolution forum thread, pretty much down due to load
• Threadless blog thread: ‘So it’s stolen… but can we keep the design?’: ‘I personally really like the design, and feel it should stay within the ranking of Threadless shirts. It would be a shame to see it on the retired page just because someone was a thief.’
• Another blog thread: ‘I want it now that it’s a rarity!’: uh, no.
• ‘i will not be purchasing this. and am reconsidering anymore purchases from this website’, OH TEH DRAMA
• Lots more Threadless blog reactions

It’s an interesting situation, and so far Threadless is handling it very
well as far as I can see — the only people who aren’t are some other
graf and stencil artists in the reaction threads, vituperating about
Threadless not using psychic powers to detect plagiarism:

i tell you, you aren’t printing any of my subs, i know it as they score way
too low to get noticed. but on the off chance that someone rips off a design
i’ve done, as blatantly as this…i would definitely seek reparations from
threadless and the offending subber. do a background check with the subbers
available websites etc.

Background checks?! wtf.

Good reaction from miso though:

Once again, we own automatic copyright on these images,…

To clarify — we are not blaming Threadless. They didn’t take the design
knowing that it was stolen [if they had done so witch such knowledge, we
would be approaching this very differently].

This is the fault of the “designer”, and hopefully this will sort itself out
in the next few days. [Who, by the way, has claimed to have done these
designs — “This is a t-shirt I designed for Threadless.”]

As yet, either GP nor I have yet been contacted by either the company or
“designer” to fix this, but Jake from Threadless has left a very nice comment
for us on “You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice”.

The Threadless blog
reactions are worth
watching if you want to follow the ongoing drama.

Tags:apparel clothing copyright graffiti ip plagiarism stencils tee shirts threadless

This post was written by Justin, source: Threadless deals with plagiarism

Here’s an excellent quote from the OpenGeoData weblog, really worth reproducing:

‘’We think the natural tendency is for producers to worry too much about protecting their intellectual property. The important thing is to maximise the value of your intellectual property, not to protect it for the sake of protection. If you lose a little of your property when you sell it or rent it, that’s just a cost of doing business, along with depreciation, inventory losses, and obsolescence.’’ — Information Rules, Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, page 97.

Words to live by!

Tags:carl shapiro drm hal varian intellectual property ip open culture open source property

This post was written by Justin, source: Maximise value, not protection (fwd)

Regarding the O’Reilly/CMP “Web 2.0 (SM)” trademark shitstorm, Sean
McGrath humourously suggested a workaround — using a different revision
number instead of “2.0″, specifically e,
2.71….

However, it’s not quite that simple in many jurisdictions, apparently. It
seems that trademark law — in the US, at least — allows trademarks which
include a number to also cover uses within roughly plus or minus 10 of that
number. In other words, CMP’s application will cover the range from Web -8.0 (SM) (assuming negative numbers are included?) to Web
12.0 (SM).

So much for “Web 3.0″, “Web 2.1″, “Web 2.71…”, and so on. Back to the
drawing board, Sean!

(disclaimer: IANAL, of course. Credit to Craig for that tidbit.)

Update: doh, got the value of e wrong…

Tags:cmp e ip oreilly trademarks us law web2.0

This post was written by Justin, source: Web x, where x != 2.0

Over at O’Reilly
Radar, a
question came up as to whether Roche’s patent on Tamiflu should be respected
if, in the event of a pandemic, people were dying on a large scale due to an
inability for Roche to produce Tamiflu in sufficient quantities.

James Love of cptech.org recently pointed
out
that the WTO made an exception for a situation like this, allowing importation
of medicines from foreign countries in violation of local patent licenses in
the case of an emergency, in a 30 August 2003 decision:

Your country would benefit from importing generic medicines produced under a
compulsory license, in order to build up adequate stockpiles or to obtain
needed medicines in the event of a crisis.

However, many developed-world countries have explicitly made a commitment
never to use this limited TRIPS waiver, namely the following:

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany,
Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand,
Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the US.

Another 10 countries about to join the EU said they would only use the system
to import in national emergencies or other circumstances of extreme urgency,
and would not import once they had joined the EU: Czech Republic, Cyprus,
Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovak Republic and
Slovenia.

So there you have it; the trade representatives for many developed-world
countries took some kind of ’strong IP’ high moral stand, and gave up this
ability. I’ll bet national health authorities are, right now, wandering
government halls around the world, looking for trade representative asses to
kick…

h5n1 ip patents trade wto

This post was written by Justin, source: Avian Flu, Health vs. IP Protection

I’ve just finished Sir John Sulston’s inspiring book about the Human Genome
Project, The Common
Thread, in
which he discusses how he found himself on one front line of the battle between
intellectual ‘property’ maximalism attempting to grab ‘property rights’ over
the human genome, and the common good, preserving such rights for all humanity
and unfettered research. (Thankfully, he — and therefore the latter side — won.)

I’ve been meaning to post a few choice quotes here about it at some stage, but
haven’t had the time — I’ve had to just limit myself to correcting the
Wikipedia entry for the Human Genome
Project instead.

Anyway, Sir John is in the news again, as part of a new international
initiative — the Adelphi Charter:

Called the Adelphi charter, it is an attempt to lay out those principles. Central among them are the ideas that policy should be evidence-based and that it should respect the balance between property and the public domain, not eliminate the latter to maximise the former.

Coverage:

• The Economist
• BBC
• The Guardian
• raw notes from Suw Charman of the ORG

Very encouraging to see something taking off at this level. I hope it does
well, and I hope Ireland and the EU’s lawmakers take note, since I’ve been
hearing a lot of IP maximalist party-line from there recently…

adelphi charter ip law patents politics sir john sulston uk

This post was written by jm, source: The Adelphi Charter