That was my initial reaction. Gotta force introspection to fight bias, though. Doing that, a counter comes to mind: isn’t this actual evolution of existing, monopolistic law that similarly rewards the few for specific types of work at the expense of the many? I think doing away with much of the copyright makes more sense given what it protects continues to be produced anyway. Even minimizing its restrictions or timing with reforms would make sense. Yet, public, businesses, and law makers behind existing system plus apathetic about extensions mostly means incremental expansion by beneficiaries is most rational move.
Honestly, the no reverse engineering and API rules bothers me the most as they enable a technical equivalent of plutocracy to any companies getting the first-mover advantage in enterprises or consumer space where migrations are costly. Given our reliance on tech, those gotta go due to who knows what long-term effects. Well, Microsoft and Oracle vs Android effects leave us little to imagine…
Looks like the intended target of this legislation is China. The EU doesn’t want furniture to be reproduced cheaply over there. Local 3d printers are probably just collateral damage.
I wonder why design patents weren’t already covering this. They seem more stringent than copyright here, since unlike with copyright, you don’t have to prove that they copied your design. You just have to say it looks like yours, whether independently reproduced or by deliberate copying. I guess they wanted to extend the term of restriction, but they couldn’t extend the term of design patents?
I don’t think it’s only that they couldn’t extend design patents, but that they’re also a bit broader. The intent here seems to be to treat iconic furniture as kind of functional sculpture, where you can make similar things, but can’t literally mass-produce the original without the original artist’s permission. I.e. it’d treat an Arne Jacobsen chair the way a Picasso sculpture is treated: other people can make cubist sculptures, even in a very similar style, but can’t take a specific Picasso sculpture, mass-produce reproductions, and sell it in gift shops. Which people have been doing with Arne Jacobsen chairs, which seems to be the proximal cause of this legislation.
Whether specific designs of furniture should be treated the same way as sculpture is an older debate, and not just in law, of course. In the Nordic region, certain subsets of furniture have been getting increasingly accepted as art, showing up in museum collections and such, which I suspect is part of why some people start finding it more like copying a sculpture to copy one of those designs, a sort of art-forgery rather than just a mass-produced chair.
I don’t know what to say other than that it makes me rather sad that we’re reverting rather than evolving in areas like these.
That was my initial reaction. Gotta force introspection to fight bias, though. Doing that, a counter comes to mind: isn’t this actual evolution of existing, monopolistic law that similarly rewards the few for specific types of work at the expense of the many? I think doing away with much of the copyright makes more sense given what it protects continues to be produced anyway. Even minimizing its restrictions or timing with reforms would make sense. Yet, public, businesses, and law makers behind existing system plus apathetic about extensions mostly means incremental expansion by beneficiaries is most rational move.
Honestly, the no reverse engineering and API rules bothers me the most as they enable a technical equivalent of plutocracy to any companies getting the first-mover advantage in enterprises or consumer space where migrations are costly. Given our reliance on tech, those gotta go due to who knows what long-term effects. Well, Microsoft and Oracle vs Android effects leave us little to imagine…
Great, now furniture companies can finally start creating after waiting thousands of years for this. Oh, wait.
Looks like the intended target of this legislation is China. The EU doesn’t want furniture to be reproduced cheaply over there. Local 3d printers are probably just collateral damage.
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I wonder why design patents weren’t already covering this. They seem more stringent than copyright here, since unlike with copyright, you don’t have to prove that they copied your design. You just have to say it looks like yours, whether independently reproduced or by deliberate copying. I guess they wanted to extend the term of restriction, but they couldn’t extend the term of design patents?
I don’t think it’s only that they couldn’t extend design patents, but that they’re also a bit broader. The intent here seems to be to treat iconic furniture as kind of functional sculpture, where you can make similar things, but can’t literally mass-produce the original without the original artist’s permission. I.e. it’d treat an Arne Jacobsen chair the way a Picasso sculpture is treated: other people can make cubist sculptures, even in a very similar style, but can’t take a specific Picasso sculpture, mass-produce reproductions, and sell it in gift shops. Which people have been doing with Arne Jacobsen chairs, which seems to be the proximal cause of this legislation.
Whether specific designs of furniture should be treated the same way as sculpture is an older debate, and not just in law, of course. In the Nordic region, certain subsets of furniture have been getting increasingly accepted as art, showing up in museum collections and such, which I suspect is part of why some people start finding it more like copying a sculpture to copy one of those designs, a sort of art-forgery rather than just a mass-produced chair.
I know right. Even if the idea is to prevent cheap Chinese knock-offs, wouldn’t a tariff be a better option?