Photo by neutralSurface
Right now industries with a lot of copyright protection might actually have something to learn from industries such as fashion. What is the type of ownership model, in a digital world, that will lead to the most innovation? Fashion might be very good place to start looking for a model for creative industries in the future.
Johanna Blakley gave a very insightful talk on TED.com regarding the Fashion industry's take on plagiarism.
In the fashion industry, they have very little copyright protection. They have trademark protection, but no copyright protection and no pattern protection. This basically means that anyone can copy any garment and sell it as their own design.
So how do luxury high-end brands remain in business? Why pay for an original, if you can pay a tenth for a knock-off? Hasn't copying destroyed the industry? Interestingly enough, they found the counterfeit customer is not the same customers that buy high-end designs. It is a very different demographic. And one of the magical side-effects of having a culture of copying, is the establishment of trends. It is legal for people to copy each other.
Fashion isn't the only industry that operates without copyright. You cannot copyright jokes, food (the recipe or the look-and-feel), the sculptural design of automobiles, furniture, magic tricks, hair-do's, open source software (they decided that they don’t WANT copyright protection), firework displays, the rules of games, or the smells of perfume. And even though some of these industries might seem marginal, if you look at the gross sales from Low Intellectual Property industries (like food, automobiles, fashion, and furniture), they make the gross sales of High Intellectual Property Industries seem miniscule by comparison.
