After a recent silver charm brouhaha on Etsy, I realized that there is still some confusion about copyrights and what is or isn’t allowed. We design most of our products from scratch. They begin as sketches in our studio and eventually become beautiful little silver charms, pendants or findings. Our goal is to inspire you. We love it when you buy our parts and incorporate them into your jewelry. Every designer has their own style and I never cease to be amazed at the myriad ways even a simple silver link can be used to create new looks.
Using Nina Designs’ parts in your jewelry is NOT a copyright violation, nor is re-selling the parts you’ve purchased from us. However, if someone takes our silver charms to Asia, has copies made and sells them on Etsy or anywhere else, that IS a copyright violation.
If we see anyone selling copies, we take action to defend our copyrights. This protects us and it protects you, because the copies are usually cheap and shoddy. In the recent situation on Etsy, we responded to complaints from our legitimate customers when a supplier offered Nina Designs knockoffs for sale.
I hope this clears up any confusion. Any questions?
Have you had negative experiences with people copying your designs?
Lotus pendant we designed from scratch.
One of many ways to use the lotus pendant in a jewelry design.
Jewelry Copyright infringement is very common. In the face of plagiarism, it is hard to decide when to take expensive legal measures and when to let it slide. If you do decide to take action, what are your options? I asked Dawn Newton from Fitzgerald, Abbott and Beardsley LLP to walk me through the process:
As a first step, you might have your lawyer issue a Cease and Desist letter alleging copyright infringement and pointing out that copyright infringement can be subject to statutory damages up to $150,000 per infringement. For small infringers, the threat of litigation on this scale can be ample discouragement. Large jewelry designers routinely participate in large scale litigation and unless they immediately perceive liability, they will not necessarily be swayed simply by a cease & desist letter. In some cases, even if they know that they are in the wrong, they may require a company to sue if it is very small, because they may (often accurately) assess that the likelihood that the claimant actually has the money and energy to sue them is slim.
Copyright law is set up so that it is not easy to lose your rights. Failing to pursue one infringer will not void or eliminate your rights entirely, but it may result in a valid defense by the infringer you fail to pursue. Designers who want to protect themselves should take prompt action against non-trivial infringement, if they wish to preserve their rights against the infringing designers.
You should budget a minimum of a couple thousand dollars if you want to hire an attorney to help you send a cease & desist letter. This is because a good intellectual property attorney will spend some time interviewing their client, looking at the designs, and asking questions about the dates of production and the origins of the design, before crafting a letter. You should also anticipate involving your attorney in any subsequent negotiation with the infringer.
To read our entire blog series on copy cats and copyrighting your jewelry, please click on our plagiarism tag on the menu bar to the right.
My last post on jewelry copyrights was very popular so I asked Dawn Newton, a lawyer at Fitzgerald, Abbott and Beardsley LLP to write up a few clarifying guidelines. I am printing her words below because they are clear and concise:
Unlike fashion designs, jewelry designs may be copyrighted under current law. (Those who are interested in the protectibility of fashion designs may wish to follow the status of the Design Piracy Prohibition Act which is currently pending before the United States Senate as Senate Bill 1957.) To qualify for copyright registration, they must only be an original work of expression, in fixed tangible form.
Artists often wonder what amount of originality is required in order to obtain a copyright registration. The answer is very little, provided that the inspiration for a design is not another copyrighted work. A jewelry designer may create a stylized impression of a flower, a bird, or a pinecone, inspired by those things in nature, and even if the resemblance is similar, as long as there is a small amount of artistic inspiration, it is sufficiently original to qualify for copyright registration.
But there is a significant difference between obtaining a copyright registration for your work and preventing anyone from creating their own work that bears any similarity. If your inspiration comes from nature, or anything in the public domain, other designers are also free to draw from those sources of inspiration, and it can be difficult to establish that a designer copied your design if that design is just a faithful replica of a natural phenomenon. The more unique your design in some aspect, the better the likelihood that you can distinguish your product from others and, if you choose to make a claim for copyright infringement, you have a better chance of succeeding. (more…)
Has someone copied your best design and left you steaming mad? Copy Cats are a perennial problem in the jewelry world, where copyright violations are rampant. We hear about it all the time at Nina Designs and we experience it too. I once received a catalog from India that consisted entirely of pages xeroxed from my own catalog! While we copyright all of our sterling silver designs, there is nothing I could do about an Indian Copy Cat with no physical presence in the U.S. The sad truth is that while litigation, or the threat of litigation, can be useful in certain extremely blatant situations, jewelry copyrights are notoriously difficult to enforce. Our response? We try to have so many designs in our pipeline that no one else can keep up with us!
Sometimes our competitors make exact copies of our designs. Other times, the connection is less direct but just as striking. Chanel recently came out with earrings almost identical to our gold plated silver Deco Rose pendant and Tiffany just launched a whole collection of silver keys.
Chanel Earrings like our Deco Rose
Gold Deco Rose Nina Designs Original Design
While frustrating, copycats are just a fact of life in fashion. They can even help drive up demand for your designs. We are fully expecting our silver keys and Deco Rose to get even more popular now that the Big Guns have put their marketing muscle behind those looks. Likewise, we tried for years to get traction with our gorgeous Black Satin collection, but it wasn’t until jewelers started pushing the look in the Sundance catalog and other trendy venues that sales took off.
It also helps to remember that we all get inspiration from perusing the magazines and checking out jewelry where ever we see it. I know I should look people in the face first, but my eyes go straight to their jewelry! None of this takes the sting out of seeing your designs copied, but since there isn’t much you can do about it, why not look on the bright side? Remember, “Imitation is the highest form of flattery.”
