#honestly christian customs have been one of the easiest things I’ve had to research | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ginnyzero · 4 years

Text

Knock Offs, Counterfeits, Clones, and Plagiarism

And how does this apply to Fashion and writing.

I’m a fashion person. I’m also a writer person. And the last three years or more I’ve spent more time being a writer person than I have been a fashion person. (My current dream job is putting together a girl targeted AAA noncombatant horse MMO with enough clothing skins to rival GW2. Yes. Goals! GW2 is known as Fashion Wars.) But both industries, and a lot of industries have a major problem with theft.

I’m not going to talk about outright e-book download theft and how that hurts authors. I’ve already done that.

No. I’m talking about creative theft. Writers and Fashion Designers stealing from other Writers and Fashion Designers. I’m talking about companies stealing the designs/ideas of Designers and Writers and copying them. I’m talking about knock offs and counterfeiting, genre clones and plagiarism.

Theft is the reason why we have copyright, trademarks and patents. Because human beings like to steal from each other for some reason and the easiest thing to steal are ideas. Ideas are hard to prove to be original. It’s hard to prove who had the idea first. (Fashion is just beginning to tiptoe into patents. Trademarking has been standard for years.)

So, what is the difference between a knock-off and a counterfeit?

Well, both are stealing. The knock off however doesn’t try to pretend that it’s from a famous brand name.

A knock off design is a long standing tradition in fashion. Designers like Worth would put out their designs for the new seasons in the windows, other seamstresses would come and sketch the designs and go back to their studios and make the same designs out of different fabric at a lower price. (And quite possibly a lower quality.) Apparently, I had a relative that could do this! She could go look at the designs in the window, sketch them and come home and pattern them out for herself. As far as I know, she did this without any formal training.

I could probably do this, but I do have formal training. I choose not to.

The knock off design isn’t pretending to be a gown from Worth or any current famous day designer. The Knock Off looks the same usually in different materials at a different price point and gives the customer a feeling that they have luxury goods even if the label is different.

In Asia, the customers are so obsessed with brand names and labels, that the high end companies have made it a point to have their products in three or four different price points so that all the customers can have their goods. (Or else no doubt knock offs and counterfeits would abound even more than they already do.) Now, this was a good decade ago. It might have changed. This policy hasn’t been instituted anywhere else that I’m aware of. But this is one way that big name brands can discourage knock offs, basically, by doing it themselves by embracing more than their “core customer.”

A knock off in writing. Well, it’s a clone.

Remember when the Hunger Games came out and everyone compared it to Battle Royale? And Suzanne Collins swore up and down that she’d never read that series or seen the movies or even heard of it. (Unless she was into anime, I’d believe her. Battle Royale was a bit niche even for anime.)

Dungeons and Dragons “ripped off” Tolkien. (As did Forgotten Realms.) Warhammer “ripped off” Dungeons and Dragons. WarCraft “ripped off” Warhammer. (Only because Warhammer backed out of a game deal with Blizzard and they had too much money invested to abandon the project. I bet Warhammer is wincing now.) And lots of MMOs ripped off World of Warcraft.

They’re clones. They’re genre clones. The difference between all of them is that none of them are claiming that they’re Tolkien. (Tolkien created a mythos based off the legends and tales of Europe, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and Christianity.)

It doesn’t become a counterfeit or plagiarism until the writer directly lifts words from the other writer or tries to pass the garment/handbag/pair of shoes as coming from a high end company when they really don’t.

We’ll get to trademark infringement in a moment.

Using someone’s design stitch for stitch, color for color and putting in a label that can be mistaken for a high end company’s label like Gucci or Fendi etc is counterfeiting. Taking someone’s words, word for word, from another book, more than 50 words, without credit is plagiarism.

It’s stealing

Stealing is wrong.

Now, yes, to a certain extent knock offs are wrong too. Let’s not get into the idea that “oh, because I presented it as my own, it’s okay.” Knock offs and genre cloning are really this grey area. So, here is where we get into trademarks.

Trademarks were created by the gov’t in order to protect, along with copyright, intellectual property. Trademarks deal with words and visuals and in fashion, they deal with overall design details. Trademarks, the applying of trademarks and not applying for frivolous trademarks and trademark infringement is one of those things that gets lawyers involved and no one makes any money.

The Lord of the Rings is a trademark. Elves aren’t trademarked. Dwarves aren’t trademarked. The Lord of the Rings as a property is trademarked.

That eye searing color of pink that T-Mobile uses on its products and stores. Trademarked.

The double stitching on denim back pockets, the red tag on the back right pocket and the specific leather back tag on Levi Jeans, trademarked. (In fact, they even might be registered which is a step beyond trademarking.)

These are things that make each brand different. If you want to write high fantasy, you can’t use the series title “the Lord of the Rings.” Sure, go ahead and have rings in your story. The Shannara Chronicles did it, there is another series that did it that I can’t remember the name of. But you can’t title it, “The Lord of the Rings.”

If you’re a phone company, don’t even think about bothering to use anything close to that color of pink that T-Mobile uses. They’ll sue you for trademark infringement. Customers might confuse your store for theirs. And they can’t have that!

If you want to design a jean, don’t use double stitching across the back pockets, ban the color red from all your tags and for all that is holy don’t think to use the Levi Logo on a brown leather square on the back of the waistband (or that color of brown for that matter.) Those are Levi’s. People may see those things and think you’re wearing Levi’s. (And I mean, no line of double stitching in any design. It’s a no go.)

Creative people draw from other works of art and writings and from the world around them all the time. There are trends in media and there are writers/corporations/designers that want to jump onto those trends and try to get a bit of that money that everyone is spending on that particular trend at that particular time. (All the dystopian novels that came out after the Hunger Games. All the little WoW MMO Clones. Kanye West’s designs showing up in the windows and on the racks of H&M.)

There are literally writers dedicated to writing stories to fit Amazon search term/graphs. There are writers who take the themes and stories from other writers, dress it up in slightly different trappings and try to peddle it as original. They clone the work without changing it significantly. They use imagery and ideas and even words similar to other popular writers in order to try and leech off those other writer’s fan bases.

Now, I have an entire rant about not worrying about being too original because it’s all been done before.

What I’m saying here is don’t be so unoriginal and draw only from one work of stories or deliberately tread into another author’s trademarked series in order to try and present their works and brand as your own works and brand.

There’s a difference between a Lord of the Rings clone and a Lord of the Rings fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off. A clone is going to do more than just change the “setting” and the “names.” A clone is going to introduce new plots and new ideas drawn from other sources than just Tolkien. Yes. It’s going to be, “Oh, this is similar to Lord of the Rings.” (The first Shannara book didn’t stray quite as far as it should have from Tolkien, for example.) But it’s still going to be different enough to say, “oh, and I see other mythologies and new themes are being explored and it’s advancing the genre.”

And if it doesn’t, then it’s a bad clone even if the names and settings have been changed. It remains that fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off of it.

In fashion, in general, I wince at “brands” that I can tell or have explicitly stated that they’re knock off brands.

They may not realize they’re knock off brands. If part of your company story is going to a store, buying a product and then finding out how to recreate it at a lower price point, then you’re a knock off brand. They may not get this because some, not all, the people who do this don’t have fashion training. And don’t know how fashion business works and why knocking off “styles” of stuff is bad. They didn’t design that style. They didn’t put thousands of dollars into researching how to make that shoe and make it comfortable from sole to last. They went and bought it at a store and copied it. Then they’re presenting it as their own under their name.

Why are they knocking off that handbag? Or shoes? Or item of clothing? Mostly, to make money. But their voice, their point of view as a person isn’t coming through because honestly, most of the time, they don’t have one. I’m talking about fashion brands here started by not fashion people who haven’t gone to school, or companies that don’t hire fashion designers. They make me whimper and cringe. Why? Why? Why? Money. Ohkay, profit isn’t a dirty word, but don’t you feel the least bit dirty taking someone else’s design and remaking it? How can you be remotely proud of that?

It bugs me.

Writers who deliberately want to make a Narnia clone or a Star Wars clone or insert popular trend of the moment clone make me wince as well. I have to ask myself, though I don’t ask them, what they think they’re bringing to the genre by just making another rendition of a popular thing? What questions are they asking? What themes are they exploring? Or are they just trying to make money? Do they really have their own story to tell? Where is their voice? Where is their personal experience?

Personally, if I want to read more of a popular universe, I go to AO3 or FF.net and I read fanfiction. Not only is it free, there’s roughly the same amount of good to bad that I’ll find on bookshelves. The characters are the characters I know and love and leaving a kudo or comment can make someone’s day! (Okay, leaving a review of someone’s book can also make an author’s day. Seriously! Leave reviews!)

When I sat down to write the first book of Heaven’s Heathens. I wanted to write Urban Fantasy. I like the worlds that Kim Harrison and Jim Butcher and Patricia Briggs and Laurell K. Hamilton create. And there is a lot of Urban Fantasy on the shelves and it’s mostly mysteries. And it’d be easy, oh so easy, to create a clone of one of those worlds to put in all the different races and the tensions and try to put my own spin on that. (And there are plenty of writers who have done that!)

And I do have an idea like that. My idea draws on another popular genre as well. (And I’m amazed at how popular that genre is to be honest. It baffles me like Amish romances baffle me.)

But that didn’t feel right at the time. I didn’t want to be another clone of another urban fantasy. I didn’t want to be dystopia either. Even though that was popular at the time. I wanted to write about bikers and werewolves and touch upon themes that were important to me; belonging, family, emotional labor, feminism, healthy masculinity, different types of dating.

Straight up urban fantasy didn’t seem a good fit. Putting it in today’s world might be a bit touchy. And the only place I could think of where leather was accepted was post-apocalyptic fiction. And with that, I could set it into the future and have fun with technology making it science fantasy instead of just pure urban fantasy. There’s more adventures in science fantasies and I’m good at writing adventures and action. (And silliness, I’m good at silliness.)

Originality comes from taking the building blocks of different ideas and different designs and fitting them together in different ways to say new and meaningful things in your own voice. Remember, stealing from one person is plagiarism. Stealing from many is research.

Knock offs and cloning, counterfeiting and plagiarism, the deliberate and with intent stealing of other people’s creative work, words, writing and designs and presenting them as your own is wrong. Counterfeiting and plagiarism is straight up illegal. Knock offs and clones aren’t as long as they don’t stray into trademark infringement. Though there is a very good question about morals and ethics if you want to knock off another design or another book.

The reason why there are so many kitchen sink urban fantasies out there outside of the popularity of the genre, is because they don’t stray into trademark infringement, the worlds are different, the protagonists are different even if they are essentially all doing the same thing; solving mysteries. And there is nothing wrong with having 101 different types of kitchen sink urban fantasy mysteries with private eye wizards or mechanics or nurses or bounty hunters or security people or line cooks at bbq joints that double as assassins. (And those are the ones I’ve read.) Because the world building is different, the characters are different, the rules are different. They may be clones but they aren’t direct copies trying to pass themselves off as from super popular writer.

And readers like this because that means there are more kitchen sink urban fantasies for them to read (regardless of quality.)

So, if you want to write a kitchen sink urban fantasy go right ahead. Just, remember, you need to take your voice and your experience and your themes and infuse them into your writing by creating your own characters and writing in your own world instead of using someone else’s.

In fashion, it’s the same way. There are basic building blocks to fashion. There are basic ideas for clothes, the tailored jacket, the 5 pocket jean, the basic t-shirt, the pencil skirt and so on and so forth. And if you want to create a fashion label, then by all means, create a fashion label and remember that these basic building blocks (that everyone needs) are launching and jumping points for higher designed clothing. Don’t go out and buy someone else’s pencil skirt or t-shirt or bootie and cut it apart and trace their pattern. Take your voice, your experience with clothing and try to find out what is important to you in fashion, what types of things do you want to wear and others like you want to wear. Those are the fashion details you bring to your clothes!

Be yourself. Find your voice. Then, you don’t have to worry about being a clone or a knock off or being sued for copyright or trademark infringement. (Though looking into various fashion trademarks is a good idea to be honest.) If you have something you want to say and it’s important to you, you’ll find a way to say it without relying on the ideas of others.

0 notes