Harvard Law Prof Is Helping to Draft Fashion Copyright Bill
In the last few months, fashion houses Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen have accused Steve Madden of ripping off their shoe designs and filed suit. But they face an uphill battle in court, because the U.S. lacks a fashion copyright law.
Sen. Charles Schumer—along with Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk—is working on that. The New York senator first introduced a fashion copyright bill in 2007, Suffolk University Law School librarian Betsy McKenzie notes on Out of the Jungle. Language has held up previous versions of congressional fashion copyright bill, the Boston Globe reports, but this time Suk is helping with the language specifying just how similar an article of clothing can be to another before being considered a sanctionable knockoff. After co-authoring “The Law, Culture, and Economics of Fashion” in the Stanford Law Review last year, her expertise on the subject has been in demand.
What inspired her research? “Books, music, film, and art are protected by copyright law,” but not fashion designs, Suk told the Globe. “When you see an anomaly, you want to know if it’s anomalous for a reason.”
Suk recently published At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution Is Transforming Privacy, and she told the Globe that some of her feminist followers were aghast by her interest in fashion. But she sees fashion as something we all have in common.
“People have a lifelong relationship with the clothes that they put on themselves,” she told the Globe. “One way or another, we all have a stake in what we wear. When you learn the way that the law regulates that part of your life, you start to ask questions. No matter what kind of clothes you wear.”
