Imitating Style Websites: Another Local Fashion Faux Pas

There’s just something about the Philippine fashion industry that bothers me so much I don’t believe we have a fashion industry: it’s the sheer lack of originality. Yes there’s the fact that it’s usually uninspired and repetitive, but I, with awesome passion, just hate the imitation!

Apparently, this undesirable trend has gone into other aspects of the industry.

While looking for research materials for my SLR on fashion and patents, I came across what claimed to be a resource for Philippine fashion. I initially thought I just clicked a wrong link to one of my favorite websites online, or its sister website. But no, lo and behold, turns out I was looking at a local “fashion” magazine’s website! What I initially thought was style.com, then men.style.com, turned out to be a really, really bad imitation! How wrong is that?

You see, the new trend in major fashion corporations is to keep an online resource or equivalent for the major fashion magazines. Condé Nast Publications is one such corporation essential in the fashion industry, only because they publish what is the biggest fashion magazine, in fact what some recognize as the only fashion magazine, in the world: Vogue. They also publish the other must-read’s (or must-stare-at’s) for the style savvy such as Vanity Fair, GQ,

and Details. As the forerunner in the industry, they realize the importance of keeping an online presence, so they then published style.com and its male equivalent, men.style.com.

And soon everyone followed suit. Clearly some websites went beyond taking inspiration from style.com, and so went for a similar lay-out, similar contents, and hey, a similar name! Actually, it’s not just a similar name, but a popular moniker for Vogue across the world!

The imitation has to stop at some point. I mean as if it’s not enough that clothes are copied, magazines are duplicated but with different names and models, and now, even the websites.

The Imitator however, can rejoice in the fact that the Original is totally oblivious to her existence.

(I originally wrote the name of the local magazine and the website, but that may be fertile ground for a libel suit.) ;-)

confessions

I am a copyright infringer; a downloadict who can’t seem to function and proceed to do more important things without seeing max download speeds on my bandwidth meter. I know it’s wrong and very akin to stealing –no, it IS stealing--but I just can’t give up the ease of being able to get newest and freshest albums, comics, and movies at the expense of a few clicks. It’s virtually free since I don’t pay the house bills. All I have to worry about is file storage and backup. Even that is starting to be less of a problem nowadays since storage media is getting cheaper nowadays due to market forces (read: China) and technological development.

I tried to get out of this pit I am in but I just can’t. I even came to a point where I tried to play mind games, forcing myself to think that downloading the latest Hollywood flicks is just as wrong as murdering a person in cold blood.

It did not work. I failed, miserably.

typosquatting

This evening while surfing the net for the latest happening in the IT world, I came across this news headline: "Microsoft sues domain name registrar for typosquatting." This was followed by about 30 seconds of head-scratching. Typo-what?! Apparently, the practice of "typosquatting" or as some would call it, "cybersquatting", is the act of snatching up domain names that are confusingly similar to a popular company's marks in order to profit from Web advertising. According to IT World, "typosquatting is the practice of registering domain names that contain misspellings of trademark terms. Cybersquatting is the registration of a variant of a trademark."

The offense is basically a form of trademark infringement, rooted in the protection of one's intellectual property. In this instance, the domain registrar that Microsoft is suing is called Red Registrar, which according to Microsoft owns the following domain names: windowslivecare.com, msnmesnger.com and ageofmathology.com. As the IT World article reported, web surfers may be tricked into clicking ads on the typosquatting sites instead of the true Microsoft sites. In IP Rights terms, the bogus sites get to ride on the goodwill of the goodwill of the popular company's name and amass profits from this.

The suit was filed by Microsoft against Red Registrar in Seattle on December 4, but was actually precedented by similar law suits filed by other big names such as Yahoo and Dell against another domain registrar.

In this day and age, more and more suits are being filed with causes of action rooted in intellectual property. These suits are being complicated by the element of information technology. I wonder how many more curiously named causes of action will arise in the future, such as typosquatting.