Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011. It is a news item about the follow-up to Inditex withdrawing shirts after a plagiarism complaint by French fashion bloggers.
When you make an accusation, you always have to keep the boomerang effect in mind: the accusation can end up coming right back at you. The French bloggers who accused Inditex of plagiarism, forcing the company into a sudden decision to pull the shirts at the center of the plagiarism claim, are now in the sights of the fashion companies.
Inditex didn’t want to stir up controversy, so it withdrew the product quickly. But now that things have cooled down, some clothing brands are asking how they can be accused of plagiarism by the very people who are the first to benefit from publishing garments without prior permission, since much of the content on those blogs is based on exactly that: fashion and photos of models wearing clothes.
That said, because these bloggers are fashion trendsetters with around 40,000 unique visitors a day, the brands admit that the publicity they can give their clothes is very valuable, and that bloggers and clothing brands “need to get along.”
Nobody has wanted to get into whether what Inditex did is plagiarism or not, since plagiarism would have meant printing the photo itself on the shirt, not a drawing or caricature based on an image, although that remains to be settled.
What is clear is that as blogs grow and turn into businesses, we will all have to be more and more careful about what we publish, especially when it comes to images, because you never know when a legal complaint might land on you.
In this case, the bloggers’ accusation had the effect they wanted at first, but now it has turned some eyes on them.
Featured image: Artem Beliaikin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
