I love Threadless & IP rights

January 16, 2009

I love Threadless, a lot. Threadless (just in case you missed them) is a community site where people can submit designs for t-shirts and vote for them. Winning designs get produced, the winner gets $2500 and everyone else gets to buy fun, funny and creative T-shirts.

So, Exactly how much do I love Threadless? To the right you can see a picture of most of the Threadless t-shirts I own. There are about 50 in that picture (taken in Amsterdam, where I live) and there are more in Eindhoven (where I also live).

Indeed Threadless has a lot to do with why I came to work for Shapeways. What Threadless is for T-shirts, Shapeways will be for all other stuff. Which is what makes what happened to me the other day quite interesting indeed.

A friend of mine lives in Chang Mei, Thailand and was in Amsterdam to visit his family and friends. As a present he brought me a T-shirt. He talked about markets in Chang Mei where you could get the funniest shirts for next to nothing and gave me one that combined my love of reading for my love of cool t-shirts.

I can be an idiot at times and was so immediately after he gave it: exclaiming in short order that not only did my girlfriend have the very same shirt but that it was a Threadless shirt, making it abundantly clear to everyone that his gift was pirated. This was a complete surprise to him, and just one more incident of me ruining something by blurting out what I’m thinking. To the right you can see both t-shirts side by side, with the Threadless shirt on the left and the Thailand one on the right. See the shirt on Threadless here.

This incident has many far-reaching and interesting implications for communities such as Threadless and Shapeways as well as the future of “peer production”, mass customization and intellectual property in general and is interesting to me for 9 reasons:

1. Usually pirated materials are bought with the buyer knowing fully well that it is pirated, ie “look there is a Puma logo on those $10 shoes”
2. Usually it is the big brands, the recognizable brands names and logos that are copied, indeed the element of brand recognition is the reason why the person buys the pirated item, ie “A Louis Vuitton bag for $15, wow, this is my chance to pretend that I own one.”
3. Usually copyright infringement happens precisely because a product is expensive. “What $700 for Windows? That’s like a month’s rent. I’ll download it instead”
4. Usually piracy happens to big “boring” companies who are refusing to abandon their old broken business models.
5. Usually piracy happens to big billion dollar businesses or multimillionaire recording artists who could cry all they want from their private jets and personalized basketball courts but cannot really count on much sympathy from the general public.
6. The pirated Threadless shirt example above really puts “power internet users” in a bit of a bind.
7. Threadless makes money off of the ideas, IP and skill of Josh and all the other contributors to Threadless.
8. There would seem to be a huge business opportunity for an online business that would effectively protect the intellectual property rights of small businesses and freelancers worldwide.
9. We need to, as Shapeways, keep listening to our community directly as to how they view their IP and want to protect it.

With this approach, we must ensure that individuals like Josh Kemble can protect their IP and continue to make money online while guarding against companies that abuse IP legislation to stifle innovation. The thin line of IP is going to be challenging to walk on.