This week we are to look in to examples of work that might run in to legal problems.
At a very young age, I did actually had a couple run in tos with Nike (their small lawfirms that hound over the opportunity to catch any one unaware and be able to profit off of).
I was never a huge spender on Nike products, but I have always admired this house of top NBA players and provider of cool kicks and I have always wanted to be able to join the team in one way or the other. Back in the 2000s, there was this trend of artist/ illustrators customising sneakers and I was very in to it in joining the fun, hopefully wanting to gain some attention from the big N.
I drew on these plain pair of Dunk Lows and was really pleased with it, and after having had a chat with a sneaker shop I hang out at, I was granted some space on the shelf to see if any one wanted to buy these! Not exactly a Nike experience, but at the age 15ish? It was exciting to have some recognition by these elder cool looking sneaker shop owners, and yo we agreed on a price of $1500 HKD(around $150 GBP), not bad for a kid no?
I went by there everyday, and there were people asking about it, even a local magazine reporter wanted to include it in their sneaker section! BUT, that was when the whole downfall started : they could not report or include any non-official products in to their book. Oh well, may be i’ll make some money, but that was my first time having started to realise that there are precautions that people make, and that “taking matter to my own hands” could make some one unhappy.
Then one day after school I swung by the shop to find out my creation was taken off the shelf. What happened as I was told was, some folks from a law firm stopped by, asked a bunch of questions and ordered all customised shoes off the shelf. From that day on the whole street art/ sneaker scene ended, but I could still remember how nice it was to have had a range of illustrators and designers having their work in the window and during that time, I felt like I was apart of that era.
Seperate Incident
Hong Kong is different from China, infamous for fake goods and counterfiets due to a very seperate patent/ copyright system from the rest of the world. Here in Hong Kong, I believe that counterfiet goods just don’t appeal to the public and products like that just don’t make much money. One thing in Hong Kong’s culture though is an issue worth mentioning though is our humour (ill try and explain this another time), which really makes “highjacking designs” very popular; to get creative and show humour in poking fun at famous brands, a very common practice among local fashion brands. I have always been warned that this is a risk to take.
Here is one of the designs I made for a t-shirt brand i’m running with a few others named Bak Tee Jai:
It’s a play on the brand Kenzo, with the graphic and the wordings all switched up, the concept came from the phrase “Hit Tiger Tonight” (direct translation), a popular slang/ joke in Cantonese meaning “to do it with my wife tonight”, anddddd I tied tiger and the famous Kenzo tee together, hence the tiger being “hit” and replaced the words Paris with something else….my friends laughed pretty hard!
We are still debating if we would like to release this print, but the word from multiple local brand owners is just that “just do it” as long as they don’t find out.
Within a module trying to earn a MA in Graphic Design, I have doubters of mentioning this example myself. But ive came to think that maybe this is a good opportunity to find out if this happens in the rest of the world often? How danger is this move if we are to release this print? Do any non-Cantonese speakers find this funny? Would be nice to get some feedback !
ANDY WAS HERE
ANDY was here 🤓 