In October 2015, a shipment of 100 copies of the Round Chair by Danish designer Hans J Wegner was confiscated in Norway. They came from China and had been commissioned by a restaurant that wanted to furnish its dining room with this pedigree design. Wegner’s was: its backrest and arms, made from a single piece of curved wood, are an exercise in subtlety that he has been crafting since 1949. The firm that owns the right to produce them, PP Møbler, refused to accept the deal offered by the restaurant owner, willing to pay compensation. The video that someone recorded and which showed an excavator crushing the boxes where these replicas were kept became a kind of snuff movie for decorators and a kind of exemplary punishment for a phenomenon then more widespread than it seemed.
When that happened Hans J. Wegner had died seven years earlier, so the illegality was obvious: the copyright was still in force. But the same did not happen with other sacred monsters of design. mid-century. Until 2016, it was relatively easy to find better and worse copies of famous furniture in British stores: Eames chairs, Eileen Gray tables or Aalto stools. Nothing prevented him. The copyright expired 25 years after the death of its designer. However, everything changed when that summer the British adopted European regulations that extended that period to 70 years and sellers and manufacturers were forced to withdraw copies from the market. In a somewhat perverse now-or-never effect, digital media was filled with lists of addresses and stores where you could take advantage of the last opportunity to purchase a copy of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair for £455 (the normal price would be four figures). or a lamp similar to the Arco de Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, a design classic not exactly affordable, for less than 200.
“The line between following a trend and plagiarizing a competitor’s designs is not easy to determine, and must be established on a case-by-case basis”
Cristina Mesa, from the Garrigues law firm
The 70-year period has swept away many of those replicas, some in principle legal. Mies van der Rohe died in 1969, Charles Eames in 1978, Arne Jacobsen in 1971. Buying fakes of their pieces is illegal in many countries. But these regulations apply to exact copies: same details, same shapes and proportions, same assembly systems. The right to authorship is undeniable, but also that design sometimes moves in territories that are not exactly delimited. “It is an industry based on trends, so it is normal for different brands to market similar designs. The limit between following a trend and plagiarizing a competitor’s designs is not easy to determine, and must be established on a case-by-case basis,” explains Cristina Mesa, partner of Industrial and Intellectual Property at ICON. Garrigues.
There are nebulous practices impossible to typify. For example, many decorators often order furniture from their trusted cabinetmakers for certain interiors. They are custom pieces with colors, materials, fabrics, proportions and dimensions that are not found on the market; Sometimes they are reminiscent of emblematic designs, but in very few cases they can be classified as fakes. In other cases, the doubt arises from another question: who is the author of a design? Especially because it is not a solitary task. “In principle, the designs belong to the person who creates them,” adds Mesa. “However, there are certain presumptions in the intellectual and industrial property regulations that transfer said ownership to the employing companies. In any case, it is important that contracts clearly reflect who owns the rights to the works created, especially when it comes to designers who collaborate with companies independently.” This is the case, for example, with the sofas that companies such as C&B (later B&B Italia) produced in the sixties and seventies. Many of them were based on a technique, the injection of expanded polystyrene into molds, that had been developed by the company. In other cases, the help of cabinetmakers was essential to finish outlining models of chairs or tables with complex constructions.
But doubts can give rise to real controversies that sometimes reach the courts. The 2017 Salone del Mobile, for example, was the scene of a very high-profile event. Two of the most emblematic Italian furniture firms, Molteni&C and Cassina, decided to present – without knowing it – the same model at the same time: a reissue of a Gio Ponti armchair. They both had their arguments. Molteni&C had acquired an exclusivity agreement with Ponti’s heirs to produce his discontinued and unpublished designs. This was the case with the aforementioned chair, which had been originally produced by Cassina during the author’s lifetime, but had been off the market for decades. When this last firm produced it again, it did so from the premise that it had been a joint project. So both brands, in a way, asserted their right to manufacture it, until the courts ruled in favor of Molteni&C. It was a specific controversy in an industry whose members generally have a good relationship, and which was settled without any bloodshed: the only thing that had been presented in Milan were prototypes, so no production line had to be stopped. However, this case served to revive a persistent debate that depends on jurisprudence. From Garrigues, Mesa points out that everything depends on the type of protection sought at the time of registration. “In principle, furniture can be protected both through industrial design and through intellectual property regulations. In the first case, the piece must meet two requirements, be new and have a unique character, or in other words, be different in some way from what is already on the market. In the second case, what is required is that the design be original, in the sense of expressing the personality of its author. The positive thing is that both types of protection can be accumulated, which is a great advantage for brands that are committed to design.” Their deadlines are different. “The time limits vary depending on the type of protection sought. For example, unregistered industrial designs may have protection of 3 years. In the case of registered designs, protection extends up to 25 years. The broadest protection is offered by copyright, which protects original works for a period of 70 years from the death of the author.
Many consumers do not know when what they buy is a copy. The leading firms in the furniture sector have been carrying out educational work for years.
Jurisprudence has marked some milestones. Mesa points to the Cofemel Judgment of 2019. “The Court of Justice of the European Union has clearly opted for the possibility of protecting the design of functional objects through intellectual property regulations as long as the originality requirement is met. Protection has even reached automobiles, with the protection of Ferrari models being notable, but also the designs of Philippe Starck, the popular Stokke high chair or Brompton bicycles.” Perhaps that is why there is a feeling that copies, without having disappeared, are also less common or, at the very least, less visible than before.
There are certain battles that are fought in the courts, but the most decisive is the one fought at the point of sale and in the imagination of the consumer, taking into account that many of them do not know when what they buy is a copy. The leading firms in the furniture sector have been doing educational work for years to explain that a design is more than a silhouette. Cassina, who under the heading I Maestri produces works by Corbusier, Rietveld, Mackintosh or Vico Magistretti, it does so in close collaboration with the heirs of the designers and through an almost philological research work that documents the way in which the materials, construction techniques or proportions rigorously follow the original model.
Something similar happens with the Swiss brand Vitra, an institution in the preservation of 20th century design. They have no shortage of gallons: the founder of the company, Willi Felhbaum, developed the Eames chairs with the collaboration of the designers as early as 1953. The argument that the company uses to address this issue defends that the products arise from a collaborative effort between the designer and the manufacturer. “Together, they dedicate their time, their experience and their art to the development and presentation of new products,” says Nora Felhbaum, CEO of Vitra, in public statements released by the brand. “Their goal is to create a product that is not only attractive, but also offers the user a unique experience. There are other aspects, such as sustainability or longevity, that are also part of the design process.” When they are forced to alter the original drawings to improve any aspect, they do so with the collaboration of historians, designers and experts of the original work.
That is to say, the fever for originality is not only a question of historical rigor, obsession with brands, desire for status or vocation for collecting: the only chair capable of meeting its designer’s objectives of comfort, durability and functionality with guarantees. It is the one that is produced with the same quality standards with which it was conceived. They know it well at Vitra or Cassina; Many of their clients are not looking for pieces for their home, but for the professional field. And few low-cost replicas are capable of withstanding the traffic of a classroom or a restaurant dining room. The difference between the plywood of an Alvar Aalto original for Artek and an affordable copy is the same as that between cashmere and polyester: feel, flexibility, longevity. Not to mention the possible value of the piece over time: auction and buying and selling platforms for antique furniture attest to how highly valued certain pieces made with the appropriate materials and licenses continue to be.
In any case, the sale of replicas is still active, fueled by the high prices of original pieces. Simply type the name of a classic online followed by the word “cheap” to find stores that sell imitations with names reminiscent of the original designers. In other cases, the allusion to the copied piece is in the metadata of the website: search engines locate it and direct the Internet user to a store where there are similar pieces, but without ever specifying that it is a replica. Other stores on-line that clearly sold replicas first began to define themselves as intermediaries between producers and final consumers, and then ceased their activity. After contacting the administrators of one of them, they explain that they decided to close it because “there is no clear answer and the regulations change depending on the country.”
At the same time, affordable design has been freed from any stigma: if Terence Conran dignified furniture at appropriate prices with Habitat In the eighties and nineties, the most prestigious designers were proud to work for Ikea, which developed its own products and methods without the need to copy, and whose approaches have been adopted even by luxury brands.
In some way, the triumph of this idea is also that of design culture itself. Anyone who has come to the exhibition dedicated to Miguel Milá at this year’s Madrid Design Festival will have been able to see that his best-known pieces, such as the lamps produced by Santa & Cole, are much more than a drawing: they are a way of using the materials, of assembling the pieces to make them more resistant, of refining the design down to the invisible to make it more functional and beautiful. A chair is more than a sketch and a dress is more than a figurine. But at the same time, the problem of copies is as old as design itself. And, in a way, also an index of its success: you only copy what you want.
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