James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of the Crowds, has written a great piece for The New Yorker on how the fashion industry thrives because designers are allowed to copy each other’s work.

“The fashion industry is not alone in its surprising mixture of weak intellectual-property laws and strong innovation” he writes, “haute cuisine, furniture design, and magic tricks are all fields where innovators produce new work without being able to copyright it. This doesn’t mean that we can always do without copyrights and patents, and fashion has unique characteristics that limit the damage that copying can do: it’s relatively cheap to come up with new designs, there’s a culture of novelty, and people are willing to pay more for the right brands. But we should be skeptical of claims that tougher laws are necessarily better laws. Sometimes imitation isn’t just the sincerest form of flattery. It’s also the most productive.”

It’s a nice digestible article based on the work of law professors Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman’s excellent paper “The Piracy Paradox”, one of the most interesting and well written academic papers I’ve ever read. That can be viewed as a pdf here.