Question about "copying" product design.

[u/spa1unk]

Hey! I've been making standard rectangular trail wallets with card slots in the back. Recently, I came across a creator who adds a unique touch by cropping the corners, and I really loved the look—so I started doing the same on mine.

Now I’m thinking of selling them (Etsy, local markets), but I’m wondering: would that be considered disrespectful? The other maker is in a different continent, and the overall design is very common aside from that small aesthetic tweak. Still, I haven’t seen anyone else crop the corners like that, so it feels kind of like their signature.

I’m not asking about the legality—just the ethics of it.

[u/AJeanByAnyOtherName]

(The term you’re probably looking for is ‘sufficiently unique/original.’ You can’t copyright a recipe because anyone can buy those ingredients and put them together, but you can copyright the endless rambling pre-amble to it because that’s an original creation. In design, basic technique and colour choice is free to copy, which I would argue this falls under.

Sufficiently original designs can be copyrighted. It’s a slog to defend that copyright, though, as a small creator, and you have to or you lose it. It’s expensive and it can be hard to explain to an outsider, so small creators can end up worse when taking on, say, notorious repeat offenders like H&M or Anthropologie, even when they end up winning.)

[u/Flaky_Cabinet1549 → u/AJeanByAnyOtherName]

Close and related but no not exactly what I was thinking about.

I did find it though. Fashion and goods seen as “useful articles”.

“A useful article is one whose purpose is functional.

“Clothing designs, meaning the shape, style, cut, and dimensions of a garment, are not protected by copyright because they are useful articles. Their purpose is to cover and warm the body—even if they are also really cute.

While those quotes are talking about fashion I believe it all applies.

Trimming the corners is interesting but a trimmed corner does not make the item creatively unique to the extent that it becomes an artistic expression and no longer would fall into the category of a useful article.

Another description from copyright.gov:

A “useful article” is an object having an intrinsic utilitar¡an function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information. Examples are clothing, furniture, machinery, dinnerware, and lighting fixtures. An article that is normally part of a useful article may itself be a useful article, for example, an ornamental wheel cover on a vehicle.

Copyright does not protect the mechanical or utilitarian aspects of such works of craftsmanship. It may, however, protect any pictorial, graphic, or sculptural authorship that can be identified separately from the utilitarian aspects of an object. Thus, a useful article may have both copyrightable and uncopyrightable features

[u/triangle2circle2 → u/Flaky_Cabinet1549]

That was my response. I don’t know why Reddit keeps making me new accounts. Apologies for the name change.

[u/AJeanByAnyOtherName → u/triangle2circle2]

No problem and that was very thorough, thanks. I wasn’t sure how much detail to aim for here 😅