Everyone seems to agree that patent or copyright infringement and outright counterfeiting are wrong. The reason these threads go there is because these are clear answers with no gray area.
"Style" would be much harder to define. Some designs being more IP theft than others and this varying depending on the person making the decision.
I wonder if Loveless gets a royalty every time someone copies his style. At what point does a design style become mainstream and therefore acceptable to copy? When the original creator goes out of business, dies, or publicly state that others can use the design? I think style is completely fair game unless the creator actually patents the design, even then, the design patent lasts, what, 15 years or whatever. The laws are in place for a reason, to protect those who engineer new and innovative products. They have a certain amount of time to recoup their costs. At the time the patent expires, the design becomes public and competition is free to drive prices down if possible.
For instance, edge pro. Patent expired. Plenty of products came on to the market prior to the patent expiring. They blatantly copied the product down to the instruction manual, basically infringing on both patent and trademark. Now that the patent expired, there are products that blatantly stole the design, but put a different company name on it and change the instruction manual to exclude the name edge pro. That's ok, no patent or trademark infringement. The product is very much worth the 40 bucks or whatever it costs, and hopefully edge pro becomes more affordable in order to compete in the marketplace. They had 20 years to recoup the research and development costs, and I'm sure they did. Now it's capitalism working it's magic and new companies are emerging that took the design and tweaked it and they're selling it for even better prices. That's capitalism.
Wicked edge, on the other hand, still has a patent. Copying that design is illegal. They haven't had the 15 or 20 years to recoup their r and d costs. But when it does expire, everyone and their dog should jump on it to drive the prices down because the wicked edge is basically the same design as other clamping knife sharpeners. There's nothing really new about the concept itself, they just took the design, made it fairly unique, and patented the product. That's innovation. Should they maintain a monopoly on that design forever? No and congress, in the fairest and arguably free-est nation, has decided that monopolies are bad for the country, so they forbid permanent monopolies while still allowing a fair chance at letting innovation run freely. After all, it's money that drives it all. Innovators get their chance to earn money, and then consumers get to benefit from competition.
Thanks for the laugh!
