Abstract
The fashion industry is the Wild West of intellectual property law. Fashion design protection is essentially non-existent, and designers take what they want when they want in the form of inspiration or complete copying. As technology advances and enables fashion designs to disseminate at high-tech speeds, there is no longer room for an apathetic approach to fashion intellectual property. If the law is a means for protecting the hard work of up-and-coming artists and providing incentives for innovation, changes must be made.
This note demonstrates how the fashion industry can adopt a copyright and licensing scheme similar to that of the music industry to protect designers’ intellectual property while conserving industry norms of creative inspiration and fleeting trend cycles.
Recommended Citation
Caroline Olivier,
A Musical Cue For Fashion: How Compulsory Licenses And Sampling Can Shape Fashion Design Copyright,
19
Nw. J. Tech. & Intell. Prop.
119
(2022).
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol19/iss2/3