The Sunday Post’s Alice Hinds recently conducted and interview with ACID CEO Dids Macdonald OBE., in an article exposing the fears of SME designers. The article titled ‘Our designer fear: Small firms’ alarm at impact of high street copy-cats’, expresses the concerns independent designers and artists face as big high street names use the fast-track route to market by infringing the intellectual property (IP) of smaller designers.

In the article, Macdonald, expresses, “There’s an awful lot of small creative businesses, whether it’s fashion or product designers, that are basically the David’s of this world against the Goliaths. The Goliaths take the first step to market through theft – a lot of people call it IP infringement, but it’s just a sanitised word for theft. It is a huge and increasing problem.”

Macdonald continued, “We’ve had issues on behalf of our members against the very well-known names. We have been campaigning for a change in the law, and we succeeded in 2015 with the introduction of criminal provisions for intentional registered design infringement. “However, because the majority of UK designers rely on unregistered designs, there still isn’t that big deterrent factor. Small designers really are the prey of some unscrupulous behemoth retailers and manufacturers.”

You can read the full article here.

Thank you, Alice Hinds and The Sunday Post for raising these very real and detrimental concerns for the design industry. Dids Macdonald has been campaigning for 25 years to strengthen IP law and policy reform and continues to do so. Macdonald and ACID are determined to limit the negative impact of the Goliaths of the marketplace from infringing upon small designers so easily.

ACID will be in talks with the IPO with our ‘Top Ten’ recommendations from January 2023 onwards. In 2022 we also created the ACID IP Charter initiative which aims to produce an industry-wide list of names who support ethics, respect, and compliance in the design industry. You can sign the IP charter here.