A tangled web
In pre-Internet days, designers guarded their work, showing their catalogues only to potential clients, but that’s all changed. The ease with which a consumer can find just about any design they want simply by doing a Google image search has added to the problem. If someone doesn’t want to shell out top dollar for a brand name, a click of the mouse can give them what they’re looking for.
Peter Myerson, president of custom design firm, Myerson’s Ltd., says his company is often approached to re-create a ring a consumer has taken off the Internet. In many cases, they have no idea whose design it is.
“Our policy in these cases is to design a variation of what we see,” says Myerson, who also sits on Jewellers Vigilance Canada’s (JVC’s) board. “I don’t like to be a copycat, and I think in the trade, it’s not at all unusual for [copying] to happen. The very popular brand names are being reproduced within the trade as so-called custom designs.”
He says larger-scale copying is more common in the United States, and so are the lawsuits. “We don’t have that volume here and don’t have the wherewithal to produce those numbers,” he added. “What you’re going to see is onesies and twosies.”
Myerson says the ease of designing in-house at the retail level contributes to the problem, although in most cases, the intent is not to steal a design. Consumers often point out aspects of a particular design they like, hoping to have them incorporated into their own piece. “I think when you’re making one-offs, it’s an extra aid in coming up with another design.”
No doubt, copying can be frustrating, given the time and effort that goes into designing a piece of jewellery and the cost of taking legal action. Myerson says he’s seen his designs ‘walk,’ meaning a sketch he’s drawn up for one retailer ends up in the hands of another who then calls him for a quote to produce the piece. He’s also had a retailer give a consumer one of his designs only to have them take it to another jeweller to produce at a lower cost.
“We recommend that a design we’ve created for a retailer not leave the store, but not everybody does that”¦I’ve seen this happen over and over again,” says Myerson. “There’s nothing I can do about it but get a little aggravated. And I’ve had it happen so often that I don’t get aggravated anymore. I wouldn’t call it being a copycat. I would say it’s someone taking advantage of a situation.”
However, Myerson has also experienced the problem on a larger and more serious scale. An ongoing contract to create hundreds of cufflinks and bracelets annually for a corporate client suddenly dried up after a few years with no explanation. It wasn’t until a piece came in for repair one day that he got his answer. Sure enough, it was his design, but he didn’t make it. He later found out a new purchaser had taken the designs to a less expensive manufacturer who made a mould, but neglected to remove Myerson’s hallmark. He estimates at least 500 cufflinks were produced this way. “We actually got a lawyer involved,” he said. The client’s deep pockets and resources, however, made pursuing legal action too costly.
