This weekend, after spending all week asleep, I was finally able to give Jim a hand with his two latest creations.
Lunar Landing - 8 feet of Aluminum goodness. Vintage self leveling industrial tripod paired with a vintage 24" flood light dish.
No joke in monumental lighting! Lighting is one of our favorite categories but some things were just never produced. Things like this.
It's what should have been used to light the photos for the lunar landings, it's very space age without trying too hard to be 'atomic age'.
This light is brilliant, we're undecided if we'll sell this one. Several of our other 'created lights' have been picked up by the interior design crowd, but this "Lunar Landing" is one of a kind.
The heater lamps are doing very well and someone just bought 10 of our glove mold lamps for a steakhouse in Chicago. I love sending pieces out and having them go to public spaces.
Jim finished the Street/Floor lamp as well. Its a very loose interpretation of the Marc Newson Super Guppy. I like this one since it's just under 5 feet tall and has an on off foot switch in the base.
It's not quite steampunk, not quite pop art, solid aluminum and has been retrofitted to take standard light bulbs. Makes a great reading light! This one will probably go online to BondandBowery, though I am enjoying its solid presence around the house. It's like a quiet sentry, ever alert and always available to light the way.
We've been thinking about copyrights a lot lately. I've been following the HidenSeek/Hidden Eloise - Paperchase mess with great interest. Seems like a clear case of copying, the artist admitted to tracing Eloise's artwork, it's fairly cut and dried. However Paperchase is still failing to step up and offer H.E. royalties for images sold. Paperchase is hiding behind the designer who copied the item saying we bought it from so and so, go after her. That's wrong. Doing something unwittingly doesn't make it ok.
Early in our career someone brought us some 1940s lawn chairs, we bought them, not knowing they were stolen. The owner contacted us and long story short, she got her chairs back and I was out the money I had paid for them. I was happy she got her chairs back and I never bought from anyone after that without getting a long list of info from a seller, but I never once dreamed of holding the original owner of the chairs responsible for my mistake.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but it's still annoying to be copied.
We've seen portions of our entire website lifted, copied and pasted into someone else's website code, we've seen designs we've put together pop up here and there and it's always somewhat amusing, somewhat annoying. We've tried to find the amusing side but sometimes it just annoys me. Go get your own copy, think up your own taglines and designs.
Once we heard another shop in (OUR OWN TOWN!) using our tagline "Eclectic furnishings with a little bit of soul" in their TV commercial. They're out of business now, but it's blatant copying like that, that is less amusing and more annoying. Coming up with a decent tagline is tough, people spend $ and time coming up with those, don't swipe them! It just makes you look stupid anyways.
We're about to put a chair into production but have decided that trends being what they are and copying being king, we've decided to have the chair design copyrighted before production and our new website (still in creation) heavily copyrighted as well.
After hearing some nightmare stories from other designers about selling their custom item to Company X and seeing the Company X version released 6 months later... It's an extra annoying step that you either take or you don't. I didn't go after copycats for 7 years and have now decided that it's time to rectify the problem.
Have to say: Having your own creation ripped off is slightly different than selling a vintage item and seeing it reissued as someone else's design. That doesn't bug me so much. Sometimes when that happens it's kind of cool to know you helped, in a small way, rescue and resurrect a neat design.
There is a porcelain designer I know who makes unique porcelain items, she sold a set of 6 to someone at "major home design company", 6 months later the items were on all the shelves of all the stores of this company. Two changes, now the item was made of ceramic and with a spelling change in an embossed word. Perfectly legal. Perfectly shitty, but legal.
Of course she was devastated because it had been copied perfectly, her item had been used as a mold for the copy.
Since she's a small artist, she, like Hidden Eloise, couldn't afford a lawyer to go after Giant Corp.
Giant Corp. like Paperchase gave her the stock "unfortunate similarity" letter.
I don't understand how that can be karmically sound, wouldn't it be better to just pay the original artist for the copyright to the design and avoid a potential public kerfuffle? It's a win win. Beats the heck out of #Paperchase on twitter.
Since our lights are created and assembled from vintage pieces, it's possible that the same lights could be created by someone else. Working with vintage pieces makes it almost a given that your work is going to have a similarity to someone else's assemblage piece.
An item that we have newly custom designed and put into production? Yes, I'd be annoyed to see a copy somewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment