In a a new TED talk on fashion copyright, Johanna Blakely poses an interesting question: what is the ownership model that will promote innovation in an age where everything is digitized? Anticipating ongoing work on fashion, mostly by legal scholars rather than economists, she suggests that fashion is a good place to start looking for answers. In my view the association is a powerful one for two sets of reasons. First, fashion designs are not protected by copyright yet the industry is highly innovative and possibly even more so as the medium has become increasingly digitized (in terms of design and communication tools, not wearing of course). Second, fashion is a market process of entrepreneurship in two stages -- there are design originators mostly at the high end, and then there are design imitators who not only copy but also adapt designs to be more palatable for wide audiences on the one hand, while innovating cost-reducing production methods on the other hand. It is the market process of fashion, these two forms of entrepreneurship that feed off one another, which makes fashion innovative without intellectual monopoly. More research is needed to discern what ways these features generalize to other "digitized" media.

Interested readers can review some of my previous posts on this here:
Why Fashion? Paris gets clothed
and
I, Pencil Skirt

This summer I will be working on a related book, currently titled Fashion Econ: How Fashion Cycles and Knock-Off Designs Help Make the World a Better Place, while I'm a visiting scholar at Bowling Green's Social Philosophy and Policy Center.