There is no copyright protection afforded to fashion designs. As a result copying is a matter of course in fashion design. You don’t exactly see a dearth of creativity and innovation in fashion design, do you?  In the video below, Johanna Blakely expands on this point. Of course, fashion designers are seeking federal legislation extending copyright protection to their designs. I hate it when ideology (here, that without the worship of “property” our way of life is doomed) trumps reality.

There is no copyright protection afforded to fashion designs. As a result copying is a matter of course in fashion design. You don’t exactly see a dearth of creativity and innovation in fashion design, do you?  Here, Johanna Blakely expands on this point:

And yet, of course, fashion designers are seeking federal legislation extending copyright protection to their designs. I hate it when ideology (here, that without the worship of “property” our way of life is doomed) trumps reality.

Let’s get a basic point straight: copyright does not protect an idea. As the U.S. Copyright Office puts it: “Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section ‘What Works Are Protected.’”

So it may be true, as Consequence of Sound reports, that “just days after settling with Joe Satriani over plagiarism allegations, [Coldplay] is now being accused of copyright violations by UK musician Andy J. Gallagher for borrowing from Gallagher’s “Something Else” video with their video for ‘Strawberry Swing.’” But being accused of copyright violations and having those accusations deemed worthy of anything other than contempt are two entirely different things. As the Guardian explains, “there’s no doubt that [Gallagher's] and Coldplay’s music videos offer ‘an awful lot of similarities’. Or rather, one big similarity: they both show people interacting with animated chalk-boards.” And it may even be true that, as Gallagher complains, it seems “less than fair that [Coldplay's] video will win numerous awards and receive industry praise when [Gallagher's] director Owen Trevor had the idea the year before.”

But the answer is: so what? You cannot copyright the idea of a video involving people interacting with animated chalk-boards. As the producers of Coldplay’s video point out (pdf), the idea was hardly original with Gallagher. Nor do they claim originality; rather, they claim to have worked hard at making the Coldplay video:

We’re aware of those videos, and I don’t wish to denigrate them, but we thought there was more mileage in the technique than they had explored. We never claim to be original, just rigorous. So we wrote a story we thought would be entertaining and went about making it. It was a lot of hard work.

The specific video they produced may be original, but it hardly precludes anyone else from making videos involving people interacting with animated chalk boards.

To explore these questions, Morris writes about Han van Meegeren, “arguably the most successful art forger of all time.” Van Meegeren, “a painter and art dealer living in Amsterdam was arrested for collaboration with the Third Reich. He was accused among other things of having sold a Vermeer to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring – essentially of having plundered the patrimony of his homeland for his own benefit and the benefit of the Nazis.” Van Meegeren, however, claimed he had forged the Vermeer, as well as several others. As Morris concludes:

Han van Meegeren forged 11 Vermeers, a Frans Hals, a couple of de Hoochs and a Terborch. But . . . Van Meegeren’s greatest forgery was not any of his paintings. It was his biography. It was his success in convincing Joseph Piller, the Jewish agent of the Dutch Resistance who arrested him, and eventually the rest of the world that he was a folk-hero – a gifted artist who conned Göring – not a Nazi-sympathizer or collaborator. As such, forgery is similar to sleight of hand. You misdirect attention, emphasize certain details and suppress others. 

As the Boston Herald Blog explains, its effort to capture the collective effort of interested internet users was inspired by the success of an earlier online effort in connection with the case.

When medical illustrator Nicole C. Wolf produced her digital paintings to update the renderings of the two Gardner thieves, the public got the best images of the robbers ever produced.  Wolf’s work, done in anonymous collaboration with one of the Gardner guards on duty during the theft, has led to dozens of new leads for the museum’s investigator, Anthony M. Amore.

With those tips in mind, it’s time to provide more information about the two thieves’ physical descriptions. Each detail is aimed at jarring the memories of people who know the behavior patterns of many in the criminal underworld.

In 2005, the Boston Globe ran its own detailed review of what was known about the Gardner art heist, summing up the events as follows:

Museum officials say they take heart in the fact that some masterworks stolen from other museums have surfaced after many years. But like the investigators, the museum’s leaders are baffled by how little progress has been made since thieves entered the museum in the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, as St. Patrick’s Day festivities in the city wound down.

They are baffled especially because the thieves, though bold and clever, were hardly meticulous professionals. They took no great pains to avoid being seen, nor were they careful to avoid damaging the masterpieces they were stealing.

They posed as Boston police officers, and even though they flashed badges and wore insignias, their long coats were not part of any official uniform. The Globe located several passersby who remember seeing them sitting quietly in a red hatchback near the museum’s side entrance, perhaps waiting for a St. Patrick’s Day party in a nearby apartment building to break up before making their move. And their disguises left their faces uncovered, giving the guards a good look at them. 

Once inside, the thieves ripped a Vermeer, three Rembrandts — including his only seascape — five Degas drawings, and a Manet from their wall placements, smashing them out of their frames and leaving shards of glass and remnants of canvas behind. The thieves took some of the museum’s greatest treasures but left behind some even more valuable objects.

When they were done for the night, they made two trips to their car with the loot. Then they vanished.

Where the paintings were, empty frames now fill the museum’s walls.