In 2017, Danish company Rains filed an infringement lawsuit against Zara’s parent company, claiming that they copied the design of two iconic raincoats. The two designs include Rains’ popular $125 “Long Jacket” and $135 “Parka” styles. According to the complaint, Zara sold products that infringed Rains’ trademark at extremely low prices between 2015 and 2017. Rains won the lawsuit and successfully obtained injunctive relief from the court, permanently preventing Zara from further infringement of their designs.
After four years, the design infringement case between fast fashion brand Zara and Danish clothing brand Rains finally ended with Zara losing. Zara’s “co-optation” approach has been criticized in the industry, and it has repeatedly been involved in plagiarism incidents but has refused to change its ways. Do consumers still like this kind of brand?
It is reported that the design infringement case between Zara and Rains began with the outline design of a waterproof jacket. Rains stated that the outline designs of Zara’s two Parka Coat and Long Jacket waterproof jackets are very similar to its own parka. Although it has tried to resolve the dispute between them, Zara’s parent company Inditex refused to meet with lawyers. Finally, in 2016, Rains filed a lawsuit with the Danish Courts Authority.
Zara is on the left and Rains is on the right. Photo source: Rains
After winning the lawsuit, Rains applied for injunctive relief at the same time as the claim, requesting a permanent ban on Zara from selling the allegedly infringing jackets. The co-founder of Rains stated that the industry has been looking forward to the outcome of this lawsuit and that global giants cannot infringe design rights without limit.
In fact, this is not the first time Zara has lost an infringement case. As early as 2015, Italian fashion group OTB (Only The Brave) Group sued Zara for plagiarizing two items of jeans and sandals from the group’s brands Diesel and Marni. Although Zara insisted that its jeans products lacked originality and that there were obvious differences between its sandal products, the court ultimately declared that Zara had infringed upon the infringement and required that Zara immediately recall the infringing products, stop sales, and pay US$235 in compensation for each product. In addition, Zara has been repeatedly exposed as plagiarizing elements of luxury fashion brands and artists’ works.
It is reported that Zara has a team of hundreds of people shuttle between fashion weeks and shows every year to easily obtain the latest design trends. Cheng Weixiong, a textile and clothing brand management expert and general manager of Shanghai Liangqi Brand Management Co., Ltd., said in an interview with a reporter from China Business Daily that Zara is positioned as fast fashion and has a fast brand update speed. Through “borrowingism”, it can quickly feed back fashion trends to on the product.
At the same time, clothing industry expert Ma Gang told reporters that Zara can achieve a greater input-output ratio through plagiarism. Even if it is judged to be an infringement, the amount of compensation Zara needs to pay is far lower than the amount of money it receives from the product. profit.
Of course, in addition to fast fashion brands, there are also many domestic clothing brands suspected of product plagiarism. In 2018, the design of several children’s schoolbags of the sports brand Anta was suspected of plagiarism; last year, the well-known shoe brand Belle was sued for infringement by Louis Vuitton of France, and the Black Whale of the men’s clothing brand “Heilan House” was also sued by a well-known fashion brand ROARINGWILD accuses plagiarism. Plagiarism is very common in the fashion design industry, but there are many difficulties in protecting fashion design.
Cheng Weixiong told reporters that plagiarism seems to have become a common phenomenon in the clothing industry. Cheng Weixiong said frankly that currently, plagiarism in the clothing industry has practical problems such as difficulty in proving evidence and low compensation. Since the fashion trends in the clothing industry change rapidly, product design involves multiple elements such as fabrics, styles, colors, etc., and the time to apply for a patent is much longer than the popularity of a product. Clothing brands often focus on creating popular “hot styles”. Ignore patents.
Ma Gang believes that frequent plagiarism incidents in the apparel industry are essentially due to brands not paying enough attention to intellectual property rights and ignoring the importance of product research and development. Coupled with the low unit price of clothing products, consumers often do not care about the patent status of clothing designs.
So, how should clothing designs be protected?
Under the current legal framework, original enterprises or individuals of clothing design need to adopt multiple legal protections at the same time means to protect. To be specific, apply for a design patent for clothing designs through accelerated review channels before going on the market; secondly, from the perspective of copyright law, if it cannot be proven that the plagiarist has come into contact with the samples and design drawings, the garments and samples can be used as practical works of art. Initiate rights protection actions based on the right to claim; finally, if the relevant clothing products have achieved a certain market impact before the plagiarized works appear, the rights holder can also initiate rights protection actions based on unfair competition at the same time. </p
