The swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter among many other news outlets posted an article about fashion handbag maker Louis Vuitton and how they sued a danish art student for copyright infringements when what she had done was first create a t-shirt and then a painting, featuring one of the company’s handbags. The proceedings for both these works goes straight to charity. Louis Vuitton obviously haven’t heard about fair use in art, and they obviously need to take Public Relations 101 at their nearest educational institution.
The company lawyers and PR-people obviously thinks it’s a good idea to sue an art student over a painting of something which is similar to their product where the proceeds go to medical equipment to one of the worlds poorest regions.
After the past few days’ publications in international media a massive twitter storm has taken off under the hashtag #LVgate and the hopefully, by spreading the word far enough, Louis Vuitton will realize that cases such as this does them more harm than good.
In 2008, when the original court case was still ongoing, ABC ran a piece where a spokesperson for Louis Vuitton said “This issue is about the brand and core values of Louis Vuitton which we need to protect.” Such lovely core values. I wonder if Paris Hilton is proud to be associated with them.
Links and references:
- Nadia Plesner’s website about Darfurnica: http://www.nadiaplesner.com/Website/darfurnica.php
- Nadia Plesner Foundation: http://www.nadiaplesnerfoundation.org/page/page.php?id=home
- The Dagens Nyheter article: http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/malade-en-vaska–ska-bota-1820000
- The blog opassande.se has some good links to other sites http://opassande.se/index.php/2011/03/09/skamligt-av-louis-vuitton-lvgate/