Letters to the editor
By Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, August 6, 2006
Uniform High Point opening day a bad idea
The High Point market has been criticized in the past, justly, for rarely thinking of the best interests of the retailer. As I understand the Market Authority, they are committed to advancing the High Point market — that does not necessarily mean they are committed to advancing the interests of the retailer. I believe enforcing a unified opening day marketwide is definitely not considering the dealers' needs.
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No retailer has ever complained to me about "when the market opens." There have been justified complaints among a small number of retailers about "how the market closes." They refer to closed showrooms, and company executives as well as sales reps leaving the market early. This is justified and is easily corrected by enforcing our leases that state that showrooms must remain open during the entire market. Companies can compel sales reps to stay the entire market.
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Smaller showrooms, such as my company's 7,600 square feet, will not handle traffic increases very well. Presently, we spread traffic evenly over seven days. Our showroom in Plaza Suites is heavily shopped from Monday through Wednesday prior to the official market opening. Increasing our traffic these three days (with a Monday opening) will hinder our ability to successfully serve our dealers.
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Multi-line reps will have a much more difficult time in meeting their dealers' needs if they have to consolidate their time into fewer days and more dealers per day.
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Company executives who presently talk with so many different dealers in their spaces will face the same problem.
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If High Point is copying the Las Vegas market, they have the wrong idea. This summer, Vegas had outside displays opening in advance of the World Market Center opening day. I also believe that the pressure from major users is very different in Vegas because it is a fill-in market, after major commitments are made in High Point.
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A unified opening has the potential to aggravate the major user. He will enter buildings where some spaces are open before the official opening date and other spaces next door are closed. This is what is apt to happen on our floor. Other entire buildings will be open, allowing competitors to have an unfair advantage.
Frankly, confusion will reign and the retailer will lose. -
Major retailers have enjoyed shopping the three days prior to official opening days. We, the supply side, will gain nothing to try to change their habits. Smaller retailers also frequent showrooms outside the main buildings downtown prior to the official opening day.
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This plan has the potential to increase the tumult at the airport and auto rental companies, and surely will create problems for the restaurants both from a reservation perspective and a service perspective.
This is more of the same from those committed to improving the market. They are suggesting something not wanted by retailers. It cannot help the dealers and also will not help the smaller showrooms. Enforce the closing process but let the retailer shop as they have in the past.
Bob Roy, Jofran
Orphan Works Act doesn't pass real-world test
Brian Carroll's column (Furniture/Today, July 17, page 67) about the Orphan Works Act (HR 5439) can't go unanswered. It's important to understand how the act will operate in the real world of the 21st century, not the idealized, agrarian world of Thomas Jefferson.
How do unscrupulous actors copy fabric designs now? We and our competitors are approached almost daily by would-be customers carrying a swatch with no attribution and requesting that we duplicate it. We, and our competitors who are members of the National Textile Assn., always refuse unless they can prove they have the right to have the fabric duplicated. The unscrupulous competitor, generally not American, will simply make the copy and let the chips fall where they may.
We saw this in 2004 when Natco Products Corp. had a decorative pillow made using a design copyrighted by Weave Corp. One of our employees saw the pillow in a catalog and we went on from there. We were compensated by taking all their profits, our legal fees, and we took the infringer's stock and sold it. Natco was enjoined from selling the infringing product.
Under the Orphan Works Act, Natco could contend there was no copyright notice on the fabric (it's not technically possible to permanently affix a notice to woven goods) so it wasn't possible to ascertain the identity of the copyright holder. The remedies available to us would have been dramatically watered down from the current copyright act, and our ability to recover damages would have been subject to enormous barriers.
Our products are invariably made into other items such as furniture, bed linens, window coverings, decorative pillows and many more. During the manufacturing process, any indication of our ownership is removed. The Orphan Works Act requires merely a cursory search for the copyright owner, if there is one. There is no way to search by design image, only by pattern or vendor name, and that information is easily removed before an infringer has to face the music. So how is this search to be conducted?
At the end of the day, Chinese and other Asian competitors can duplicate our technical resources and chop pricing to shreds, but our intellectual property is what we have left. The Orphan Works Act gives them license to steal that, with only the outside chance of a slap on the wrist.
I'm sure the American importer community and their overseas vendors are salivating over the possibility of getting their grimy paws on the one advantage that American manufacturing and design still has. This must not be permitted.
Roger Berkley, CEO, Weave Corp.
Don't strip away rights of visual art owners
That Brian Carroll would think that "no dilution of protection is proposed on any creative work" in the proposed Orphan Works Act ("Sky isn't falling on true protection of copyrights") shows his clear lack of understanding of the proposed bill or the way the textile industry operates, and/or his own bias.
As a content user and journalism professor specializing in print and digital media, Carroll and others similarly situated would clearly benefit from passage of the Orphan Works Act, since they could use so-called "orphan works" with relative impunity. Rights-holders in the visual arts industry, including textile and home furnishings companies which spend millions of dollars every year creating new designs for their customers (including furniture manufacturers and suppliers) would, on the other hand, risk seeing their creations become "orphaned" simply because someone (most likely in Asia) removed the copyright notice, and there is no practical or even reasonable (let alone comprehensive) way to search for visual designs.
The U.S. Copyright Office does not have such a searchable database, and none is likely to be created in the foreseeable future. If the Copyright Office can't or won't create such a database, despite charging a fee for registering copyrights, what makes Carroll think that each visual art company will have the financial ability to create one? And what is a would-be user to do to be "reasonable," search hundreds of databases, or is two enough?
Carroll's advice to fabric mills to "document your creative work" is naive and simplistic. Even when documented, such work can be deemed orphaned if the marking is removed and the infringer claims to have done a "reasonable search under the circumstances." (Guess what? Such a search would fail to turn up the millions of floral designs the textile industry has registered with the Copyright Office over the past 30 years.)
There is simply no rational basis for applying this proposed legislation to the textile industry or other creators of visual art intended for use on "useful articles." Congress created a mess by extending the copyright term (at the urging of Disney and other "big guns") to an unnecessary 70 years after the artist's life (95 years for corporate entities).
The way to "return copyright law to its original intention" is not by stripping some rights-holder of their rights and meaningful remedies to the benefit of other "big guns" such as Microsoft, Google, the book publishers and the film industry.
Corinne P. Kevorkian, senior VP, general counsel and secretary, F. Schumacher & Co.
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