Image from the documentary “The true Cost”, directed by Andrew Morgan, 2014
On October 12, and November 15, the guest speaker Geraldine Blanche was invited to lecture about Intellectual Property Rights to the master students of Fashion Studies. Geraldine Blanche is currently a PhD candidate in SciencePo École de Droit, working on a research that focuses on intellectual property law and fashion industry.
In her lecture, Blanche firstly introduced the general concept of intellectual property in order to better explain the specific issue in fashion industry. She stated that intellectual property could be divided into four categories, which are copyright that protects literary and artistic works, patent that protects inventions, industrial design that protects the particular design of an item and trademarks that protect logos and commercial names. Blanche also emphasized that by providing copyrights, patents, industrial design and trademarks, the States provide incentive to those creators. Later on, Blanche moved the gaze to the field of fashion design. She pointed out that the US builds fashion industry on copying; hence there is no copyright protection in the American fashion industry. Finally, Blanche commented on today’s state of the art in fashion and copyrights, stating that the fashion industry operates on a low-IP equilibrium and stressing the increasing problematics coming with counterfeiting. Who is responsible for counterfeiting?; Who is the victim of counterfeiting? Is counterfeiting inevitable and why?
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Text: Anqi Ni, MA Fashion Students, Class 2016-2018
