In the last few posts, we looked at a copyright infringement case and at contemporary designs that bear some resemblance with creations from a few decades ago or with rare antique pieces. Quite often everybody seems to be copying each other or infringing someone else's copyright and trademarks. Legal matters have therefore become as trendy as ever nowadays, with big brands lamenting the damages caused by counterfeit products, designers who often seem to rip off each other and students claiming their work was stolen by fashion designers and houses.
It was only natural therefore for MSCHF, a conceptual art collective known for a wide range of interventions engaging fashion, art and technology (you may remember their controversial "Satan Shoes" that attracted Nike's ire), to come up with a new drop aimed at provoking companies and to get a "Cease & Desist" letter from them.
The ironic project entitled "Cease & Desist Grand Prix" was launched yesterday: it consists in inviting consumers to buy from MSCHF's site a shirt that illegally incorporates logos of major companies (at the time of writing all the shirts are sold out).
The first company infringed upon that sends a Cease & Desist letter to MSCHF, will help shoppers who bought the shirt with a print of their logo winning a Grand Prix hat.
All the eight companies involved - Amazon, Coca-Cola, Disney, Microsoft, Starbucks, Subway, Tesla and Walmart - are large enough to be worth infringing upon, according to MSCHF, and all of them tend to be very alert when it comes to copyright infringements.
While MSCHF is perfectly on trend with the "Cease & Desist Grand Prix", the idea behind the project is not merely that of provoking these huge companies: MSCHF receives so many "Cease & Desist" letters that they thought they could turn them into an artwork and comment in this way about the state of American copyright law that too often protects large companies (it is practically impossible for an independent creative mind to sue a huge group or company as nobody has the financial resources these giants have...).
Yet MSCHF didn't maybe expect to see some companies embracing their project: Subway didn't seem too bothered and took the "Cease & Desist Grand Prix" with irony, posting on Twitter a shirt with MSCHF's logo and tweeting, "Two can play at this game. Who's interested in this bad boy? Hurry before @mschf shuts us down."
Maybe not all companies are ready to stop sending "Cease & Desist" letters to artists, but some of them may be willing to have a good laugh with the artists involved or maybe to establish not a collaboration but the same relationship that existed between Campbell's and Andy Warhol, that may grant them the permission to use certain logos in the artistic realm to make a comment about society, capitalism and consumer alienation without being intimidated by long and expensive legal battles.
Comments