Luxury Brands Finally Succeeded In Safeguarding Their Rights. Zara Was First Sentenced To Plagiarism.

As more and more luxury fashion brands' awareness of rights is strengthened, fast fashion relies on plagiarism to maintain fast and new mode, which is facing serious challenges.

Diesel's parent company OTB sued Zara's parent company Inditex group for plagiarizing its Diesel jeans and Marni sandals design case. Though the Inditex group insists on it. Sandals There is a significant difference between the design and the Marni sandals, and the jeans of Diesel are lack of originality and there is no infringement. Milan court judge Claudio Marangoni still believes that Zara's behavior has constituted plagiarism and infringement. It requests the Inditex group to recall the infringements immediately and stop selling them, and to pay 235 dollars for each product.

The lawsuit began 3 years ago. According to the accusation made by OTB group in November 2015, Zara's manufacture and sale of counterfeit goods violated the EU intellectual property law, of which the appearance of Skinzee-SP jeans was registered in the EU.

Some experts pointed out that the verdict confirmed the possibility of compensation for infringement of registered and unregistered designs within the European Union. It is the first case in Europe. Although the ruling still has the possibility of being appealed, Dentons, a OTB's law firm, said in a statement that it "opened a new door for the enforcement of intellectual property rights within the European Union".

The picture shows Zara's Diesel jeans and Marni sandals suspected of plagiarism.

This is not the first time that Zara has been suspected of plagiarism this year. The trend media Hypebeast reported in February that Zara's new shoes were almost the same as Balenciaga's Balenciaga Speed Trainer, the ten largest sneakers in 2017. Last year, the brand had been widely debated by the industry for its imitation of Balenciaga Triple S shoes.

Although neither Zara nor Balenciaga has responded to this, so far, the plagiarism range of Zara exposed by the media has covered many luxury fashion brands such as Balmain, Valentino, Celine and Yeezy since 2015.

In fact, Zara's repeated plagiarism reflects the inherent drawbacks of its business model.

The word "fast fashion" comes from Europe. In English, it is called Fast Fashion or McFashion. Mc's prefix is taken from McDonald 's, which means selling fashion like McDonald's selling fast food. Fast fashion is characterized by many styles, low price and low quantity, so as to meet the needs of consumers.

It is reported that Zara designs 18 thousand new products every year. It can have new shelves every 2 to 3 weeks. It can produce 7 days, 14 days and 30 days. About 50 thousand new fashions are launched annually. The brand can produce a large number of styles in a short time. It is precisely because of stripping the design links from the supply chain to carry out the process operation.

The design headquarters of Zara are generally composed of 350 designers and no chief designer. At the beginning of the brand, its strategy is not to lead the fashion trend, but to draw inspiration from the diversified channels such as other brand shows and movies. The product styles will be decided by the latest sales data of different regions. Therefore, the design department has strong independence, and two times a week, according to the trend of the trend, it can provide new products to the stores flexibly.

Richard Hyman, an independent analyst in London, pointed out that the production mode of Zara has broken the traditional rules of the fashion industry and achieved the real sense of season free fashion. This quick way of producing creativity has greatly satisfied consumers' need for freshness at the early stage, without relying on the reproducible nature of original design, which has followed H&M, Topshop, Forever 21 and others.

The picture shows Gucci v. Forever 21 suspected of plagiarism.

For luxury fashion brands, the reason why they fight less is that they are closely related to the difficulty of defining the patent of fashion products, the difference of regional laws and the higher cost of safeguarding rights.

Because trademark law and copyright law do not include costumes in the scope of protection, it is not illegal to plagiarize designs that are not granted design patents in the United States. The creative part of a dress design, such as printing, can be protected, but the whole dress has no intellectual property rights, and the trademark law only protects the designer's name or brand logo.

Christiane Campbell, partner of Duane Morris law firm, once said: "if an item is protected by copyright, it can not be functional. Therefore, fashion has never been protected by law. "

It is noteworthy that Christian Louboutin can be regarded as the main luxury brand that has challenged the grey area of fashion products protection in recent years. After the lawsuit against its red shoe shoes has been filed against a number of courts in Europe for a year, the Supreme Court of the European Union announced in June this year that trademark trademark red and shoe shape jointly used by the European Union were protected by EU law to a certain extent.

Earlier, the Paris High Court also ruled that Christian Louboutin had the patent rights of red shoe, but in Holland, Switzerland and other countries, its application was rejected by the court. The incident is enough to show the complexity of fashion products' rights protection in international sales.

Secondly, patent litigation costs time, money and cost. Due to the seasonality and popularity of the fashion industry, and the fast fashion brand has a faster change cycle, usually the design product is not available until the design patent is approved, and the replica has begun to circulate in the market. Even if a lawsuit has been filed, the related products may have been replaced by the new product when the outcome of the judgment is reached.

Take the case of Gucci v. Forever 21 plagiarism, for example, the dispute between the two sides about whether "green red green" and "blue red and blue" can be used exclusively by Gucci has lasted for more than half a year. In February this year, the federal court of California approved Forever 21 to cancel more than ten requests for Gucci commercial registration. This meant that Gucci not only lost the lawsuit but also assumed the corresponding litigation costs.

However, in recent years, the negative impact of fast fashion brand plagiarism has attracted much attention, and the formation of relevant mechanisms tries to curb such behavior from the source.

In Europe, the European Union has launched a unified system in 2016. It provides a patent system for registered and non registered designers, and protects the design rights of clothing and accessories. The validity of this design patent protection is generally 14 to 15 years, and the length of validity depends on the choice of brand.

Although no public information is available at present, statistics can be made. fashion The number of design patents in the industry is increasing, but design patent applications are increasing year by year. In the past few years, the number of applications for design patents has increased by at least 1400 per year, especially from 2014 to 2015, with 3719 applications for design patents.

In addition to the international public welfare organizations providing legal aid to the brand, the company represented by the US SBC Law Group has experts and lawyers with comprehensive backgrounds in the field of fashion beauty. It can provide fashion brands with intellectual property protection services such as brand image, trademarks, copyrights, patents, licensing agreements and confidentiality agreements to help them speed up the patent application process.

It is worth noting that consumers are fast. fashion Loyalty has been kept at a low level. When there are more choices in the market, they will not hesitate to turn to another brand.

Insiders pointed out that fewer and fewer consumers are willing to buy products that are too similar to luxury brand creativity, because this will embarrass them, though Zara is fast. fashion The service experience has been innovated by means of science and technology, but the problem of lack of originality of the brand has not yet been solved.