There’s been recent discussions on TV news about ’dupe’ specific sites for fashion and home goods. The big fear is that the popularity of dupes will harm the original designers. However, the idea of fashion copyright is only a modern concept. In woodworking if you saw a chair you liked, you may pay for a plan, but then make it yourself as many times as you wanted. A cobbler would look at a shoe and know how to make it for their customer. A tailor can change a collar or stitch to match what anyone wants.There was no demand that every worker have a unique design - everyone understood it was made to order. When it becomes possible to scale a design to worldwide sales, then the claims of uniqueness seem to us to become more important - but should they?
Tom Ford commented on the issue of counterfeit and "knock off" products in the fashion industry, he said after some research (I assume by him/his company) they found that the people buying the cheap counterfeit products weren't their customers anyway, and so they weren't losing anything.
Counterpoint to that though, guilds existed as a different form of control for many hundreds or thousands of years. Instead of controlling what people can make, just control who can make it.
