Clothing Firm Pirated Itself... And It Worked Great

from the competing-in-the-market dept

As fashion designers in the US are, once again, pushing for a misguided new "fashion copyright," it's worth remembering that studies have repeatedly shown that knock off fashions are what help make the fashion industry so successful. They serve a few different purposes. They make the authentic versions appear more valuable (who would knockoff an unpopular fashion?). They help differentiate the market by letting the clothes diffuse to the lower end that would never buy the designer level clothes, and they push designers to keep innovating each year, because they want to keep coming out with something new to stay ahead of the counterfeiters.

Now, it appears that at least one clothing designer decided to use these facts to its own advantage. ReallyEvilCanine writes in to let us know how a South African t-shirt designer made its own counterfeit line of t-shirts and used that to boost the perception of the original line, while also being able to differentiate and sell into different markets:

The brand, Love Jozi, created the "knockoffs" using the name Luv Jozi, and plenty of people picked up on it, at times lamenting how the Love Jozi people must be upset, but noting that "all the biggest brands" get copied. The Love Jozi people let the whole experiment run for about two years before revealing it. However, in the process, they showed that rather than worrying about counterfeits and fakes, there's something to be said for cornering the market on such things yourself. As REC noted in the submission, even when counterfeiters don't "play fair," you can still sell looooooots of t-shirts.

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South Africa Considers Potentially Requiring Patents On Publicly Funded Research

from the say-what-now? dept

I missed this story from a few weeks ago, but one of our readers, going by the name of bikey, alerts us to a proposal in South Africa, that would potentially require patents on certain publicly funded research. While this seems totally backwards for any number of reasons (and many of us believe that publicly funded research should be available to the public since they paid for it), apparently some are concerned that "foreign multinationals" might "misappropriate" the research. So, even if a university and the researcher choose not to protect the research results with IP, if a government body determines that the results could have commercial viability, it would have the ability to control the rights. Amusingly, those supporting this proposal claim it will help "facilitate tech transfer." Actually, it does the opposite, because it puts limits and a tollbooth in the way -- but why let that get in the way.

The article notes (phew) that there's significant opposition to the proposal -- especially from researchers who are greatly troubled by the fact that researchers may have no say in whether or not their research is "protected," and how it may do serious harm to "open" research initiatives and idea sharing -- which, by the way, have been shown to increase the pace of innovation. The article also does a good job highlighting how the focus on patenting university research in the US has done more harm than good, by decreasing openness, slowing down the pace of innovation and causing universities to spend tons of money on "tech transfer offices" that get too focused on trying to lock up every idea a professor has. All in all, this proposal sounds dreadful. Who would support it? Well, at the end of the article, they indicate Microsoft is a big fan. Anyway, since the article is from a few weeks ago, it would be great to know if there's been any update on this. Anyone have any info on whether this proposal is going anywhere?

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Board Game Maker Sues Google, Claiming Trademark Infringement

from the publicity-stunt dept

Yehuda Berlinger points out that a board game company in South Africa that has a Cricket-themed board game called "Googly" is suing Google over trademark, claiming that Google's registration of the google.co.za domain name violates its trademark. Of course, as the site writing about the story notes, no moron in a hurry would ever confuse the two (though, I'm unaware of whether or not South Africa accepts the moron in a hurry test for trademarks). My guess is that this is really just a publicity stunt by the board game maker, (correctly) realizing that this little lawsuit would get them some press.

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