P.Y.R. (Protect Your Rights) by David Ericsson for Blå Station: Design for Workplace Privacy

P.Y.R is a celebration of simplicity and a question of were the boundaries are between what is yours and what is mine. Could a great idea, turned into a simple product – obvious and easy to copy – still be protected by Intellectual Property laws – or should we just surrender and give it all away?

Protect your Rights

We live in a world where imitating, doing the same or copying – is favoured and rewarded by consumers’ ignorance and desire to have everything at the lowest possible price. In this world, the spiral goes downward until those who imitate and copy eventually are imitated and copied by others, who in their turn are imitated and copied.

This is despite the fact that everyone wants the new, unique and innovative products, although preferably without protection, so that the stolen, similar and copied variants quickly reach the market, and can be obtained there at a noticeably lower price.

Should innovative simplicity be considered as, “free-for-all”, or could it be just as valuable and worth protecting as the complicated?

Photos by Marcus Lawett.

More about P.Y.R. @ blastation.se

Design and product development are not what you see, because you only see the result of a long and costly process. A design process that requires an enormous amount of patience and an incredible amount of knowledge. At the same time, under constant pressure and stress, you do not want to miss the launch opportunity where clear information, product description, access to images, measurements, 3D files and certificates need to be in place. Today, everything has to be described in detail. At the same time, being inspired or doing the same thing is cheap, fast and completely risk-free.

Is that really how we want it?