In an increasingly digital world, intellectual property theft is on the rise, often unknowingly. Social media makes it incredibly easy to infringe copyright – by simply reposting someone’s copyrighted work, for example – and the latest generative AI programs, such as Midjourney, are currently at the centre of controversy because of the way they scrape artists' work from the web without their consent.
Against this landscape, copying will no doubt become increasingly normalised, although no less illegal. Ignorance cannot be an excuse for the large international brands that are most often accused of copying design and craft, but lengthy supply chains (which mean that they don’t always know the creative origin of what they are selling) and the probability of them getting away with it, are exacerbating the problem.
London-based maker Lee Borthwick knows the problem all too well. In 2017, she was excited to be contacted by four separate US art consultancy firms about a commission for one of her ‘mirror tapestries’. The companies were competing for the same work for a hotel project in Florida, and she had sent drawings and proposals to all four. After a while though, communication from all of them petered out. Later, she became curious about how the project had turned out and looked at the hotel’s Instagram page. ‘I scrolled down to a see a picture of the dining room and I was like: “Oh my God. That’s my design”,’ she says. ‘I was really upset.’
Once she had discovered which of the initial four companies had fabricated her work without her knowledge, she took legal action (helped by her US agent) against both the art consultancy and the project management company responsible for the hotel build. More than two years later, before it went to court, the case was settled in her favour. ‘It was the right thing to do at the time, but it was very stressful,’ she says. After legal fees, she got around $1,000, with the knock-off version of her work allowed to stay in the hotel as part of the deal.