Running Head: HOW MAY THE IP 1

How may the IP benefit the fashion industry

Qianlin Luo

University of California, Berkeley

SU21-COLWRIT 9E-001

How may the IP benefit the fashion industry

HOW MAY THE IP

It is unsurprising that the fashion industry is lack of intellectual protection for a

long time, as a field that deeply relay on the designs or the creation of new trend, its

hard to say that a strong IP can be more benefit for the fashion industry, but like other

industries, fashion design is also well connected to the business, the designers and

brand companies need change their designs into profits, enhance their competitiveness

which need intellectual protection to protect their rights, so how can IP right plays it

roles to protect the fashion industry?

If the law disallowed design plan replicating, with more restrictions it is more

likely that the fashion industry will go through a hard time making and reacting to the

patterns, they will focus on the potential law issues, which slows down an industry

that depends on the unrestricted imagination (Sprigman, 2006). We also aware that

lack of the intellectual protection might lead to the prevalence of copying which could

harm the whole industry. Indeed, it is necessary to give enough law protection to the

designers and fashion company, but it is hard to distinguish a new trend or a start of a

theme to the action of copy, which makes the intellectual protection impact the

fashion industry from some other aspects.

One way is trademarks, the brand might create a bond between the customers and

design companies, which makes it the most wildly used approaches for fashion brands

to secure themselves in the United States (John, 2018). Using intellectual protection

on the trademarks not only can protects the trade dress such as product packaging it

shows a brand’s appeal and popularity. For instance, British fashion house Burberry

holds trade mark rights in both the trade mark “Burberry” and the Burberry check
HOW MAY THE IP

pattern, which allows the protection of brand names can also protect various

components, designs or features of a fashion apparel.

Another approaches can be the protection of designs, the designs are the core of

the fashion industry which need the strong IP. It has been a major source of frustration

for designers in the United States for some time only certain aspects of their garments,

and not the garment as a whole, are protectable (John, 2018). Outside of the US, some

countries offer an unregistered form of protection for industrial designs for a

relatively short period of time. However this protection is not suitable for everyone,

for those classic designs, if the time of the protection is not long enough, there are still

chances for the classic to get copy.

As for the fast fashion industries, they created new business models to do the

intellectual protections. For example, ZARA use IT systems to shorten their

production cycle into nearly 30 days while most of their competitors need 4 to 12

months (WIPO,2005). So, the proper usage of strategies can also be effective to the

intellectual protection.
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References

Sprigman, C. (2006). The Fashion Industry's Piracy Paradox. The piracy paradox.

Retrieved from

https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/files/80755852/download?download_frd=1

John Zarocostas, (2018). The role of IP rights in the fashion business: a US

perspective. WIPO. Retrieved from

https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2018/04/article_0006.html

WIPO, (2005). IP and Business: Intellectual Property in the Fashion Industry. WIPO.

Retrieved from

https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2005/03/article_0009.html