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I learned of a blog post on The White House with the above title.  Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator.  She states in part:

“My job is to help protect the ideas and creativity of the American public.  … Infringement of intellectual property can hurt our economy and can undermine U.S. jobs. … We want to be able to reduce the number of infringing goods in the United States and abroad.  The examples are almost endless: counterfeit car parts, illegal software, pirated video games, knockoff consumer goods, dangerous counterfeit medicines, and many other types of products – including very sophisticated technology.”

I am not sure if anyone read a post by Kimberly Shaw, but she is an illustrator of various tea cup designs, and her work appears to have ended up on a fabric line (that is being marketed towards quilt makers) without her knowledge or consent.  You can read about it here. Kim filed suit about a year ago, and the matter is still ongoing.  But if you take a look at her post, you can see she has a strong case, but she is an individual going up against a large company.

While I am all for sharing of information, helping others, and so on, this type of thing is awful.  So, if you’re interested, check out the White House blog post to see whether you’d like to send an email — not so much about how violations risk health or safety, but rather how diluting copyright laws (such as the Orphan Works Act that periodically crops up from time to time) can negatively affect how an individual earns a living.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Copyright - Orphan Works. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.