Vultures circling around fabric designs
Carole Sloan, Senior Contributing Editor -- Furniture Today, July 16, 2007
Already the vultures are circling around the designs of the still-living Quaker Fabric, which may or may not be toast. The company's customers — retailers, decorative fabric jobbers, furniture manufacturers, contract and home textiles companies — naturally are trying to figure out what to do next.
As they do, the issue of intellectual property rights, IPR for short, looms large.
It's a long-standing issue, particularly in dealing with the Chinese, who are widely viewed as copyright violators, in the entertainment arena certainly but also in the world of fabric and home textile designs. Many folks have become very frustrated dealing with Chinese authorities when it comes to design protection.
With the Quaker scenario still unfolding, and with still unresolved design legacies from Mastercraft and Home Fabrics, the IPR scenario is complex and critical, especially to decorative jobbers, whose sample books are pegged to run a minimum of three years.
The past couple of weeks has seen a tsunami of rag guys, representing both domestic and offshore mills, calling on the customers of all of these companies, but especially Quaker's, offering to replace the imperiled fabrics with substitutes — meaning outright knockoffs — of their own. Copyrights be damned!
Granted, at all these companies there were basic goods that can be reproduced legally. That's not the issue.
A number of U.S. companies have semi-publicly taken the high road in this scenario, saying they will not go near copyrighted fabric designs. But reports indicate there are a bunch of offshore guys ready to do just that.
