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cardsharp
Clawing at Right: There is nothing positive about copycats.
“It’s a thin line between love and hate” goes the old Persuaders song. Similarly, there is a thin line between inspiration and copying, believes Cardsharp. Arguments about where this line is pre-date the greeting card industry and are as old as art itself. The Renaissance masters were all heavily influenced by each other. The pre-Raphaelites of Victorian times all aped each other with both their style and subject matter. And who came first with the Cubist movement? Was it Picasso, Matisse or George Braque? Was Picasso really square or was George just ‘Bric-a-Braque’?! There are no easy answers, but it does seem that copying or at the very least plagiarism remains a real fear for modern day card publishers. Every artist or publisher of art is influenced by what has gone before and what is around them. Sometimes two almost identical looks can appear simultaneously just by chance, including in greeting card ranges. Cardsharp remembers back in the late 1990s two great innovators in the greeting card trade who were indeed great friends - the late David Hicks of the Really Good Card Company and Alan Hawkes, the then owner of Paper Rose - both released ranges of naïve bright colourful art cards that were considered revolutionary at the time. They were indeed virtually identical in their design approach and feel, but both agreed they had each picked up something in the ether so to speak at exactly the same moment. In this case,
24 PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
the Really Good range, Happy Hefalumps went on to become an enormous commercial success while Calypso put Paper Rose firmly on the greeting card map. But there is the ether, influencing, pure plagiarism and direct copying. And often Cardsharp reflects it is hard to know which is which. Organisations like Briffa and ACID offer advice, but no legal guarantees, and some would say the law itself is too slow to recognise the rights of the artist who has been deliberately copied. And while there have been victories, case history tends to favour the copyist when it comes to the law. Left: A post from Tate Britain, after its complete refresh for the first time in ten years, showing modern day artists copying from the masters! Above right: Happy Hefalumps was a huge success in the 90s for Really Good, sparking a wave of similar ranges.
Leave aside, the downright theft of designs and intellectual rights that still takes place in the Far East with many greeting card designs being translated onto other products with no permissions (more of that later), arguably more disturbing are the violations that are closer to home - copying ‘with a few tweaks’ that ensures that the perpetrators stay just on the right side of legal. The uncertainty of the result of any case brought against copiers, plus the huge legal costs involved, means that many publishers who feel properly justifiably they have been copied do not take it further. Cardsharp knows of one particular publisher whose insurance against this has been to build a special fund that it dipped