Criticism
Critics claim that, contrary to the bill's claims, the bill will actually harm independent fashion designers. The majority of independent designers do not have the litigation funds to effectively challenge big business should they be accused of copyright infringement. Furthermore, because distributors of accused designs can be penalized as well as the designer, distributors of clothing will become very wary of new designs unless the designer has adequate funds, influence, and power to hire skilled and effective lawyers. Pattern companies frequently utilize prevailing trends; so they too are vulnerable. Because of the legal risks of producing fashion patterns, fewer people will sew their own clothing, and fabric and sewing stores will suffer losses as well. As evidence of the bill's hypocrisy, critics point to how one of the most vocal supporters of the bill, Diane Von Furstenburg, was recently caught copying and distributing a piece of clothing originally designed by an independent Canadian designer. Critics also argue that the industry is already thriving commercially and encourages innovation. They point attention to the concept that originality in fashion design is too insubstantial for copyright law to distinguish protected elements from non-protected elements, and that extending copyright protection would stifle independent designers while giving powerful, big-business fashion houses a near-monopoly.
Read more about this topic: Design Piracy Prohibition Act
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)