Westminster council promises to sue souvenir sellers who reproduce street-signs
Link (Thanks, Owen!)
Westminster Council’s Martin Low said, “In buying the copyright, we felt we needed to retain an element of control over the signs to maintain Westminster’s image as a world class tourist destination.”The problem of the counterfeit signs — which are produced on everything from mugs to t-shirts to mouse mats — has ruined thousands of holidays and besmirched Westminster’s international reputation.
Tourist Mariella Bogus from Sacramento, California, said:
I paid £2.99 in good faith for a ‘Leicester Square’ fridge magnet from a street vendor, but it wasn’t until I got it home that I noticed that the font was wrong and the proportions slightly out of whack. Whatever the font’s meant to be it’s not sodding Arial and while I can’t afford a Pantone swatch book that red doesn’t look like the proper Westminster red either.
I emailed the council’s trading standards department who were very sympathetic but said that there was nothing they could do. Thank goodness that’s all changing now and people like me will get the protection we deserve from these unscrupulous hawkers. Now I feel that I can go back to London and shop safely again
.Souvenir sellers have until the end of the month to buy a licence from Westminster Council or face the full might of the law.
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It's things like this that make me ashamed to be British. Have they nothing better to spend our taxes on than checking breach of bloody copyright? Evidently not. Wankers.
Anyone else notice the tourist's name? Mariella Bogus? I call shenanigans.
This woman really needs to find something to do with her spare time. I can't even fathom how boring a person's life needs to be in order to complain about the accuracy of your souvenir refrigerator magnet.
Also the fact that she bought it in person and didn't notice that it was different until she got home is also amusing to me.
Um, the magnet person was a sarcastic hypothetical person, made up in response to the council's assertion that they need to protect their street-signs. Yeesh.
Cory, I just did a search of the UK Intellectual Property Office and you might be interested in something else that Westminster appear to have recently registered:
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/t-find-number?detailsrequested=C&trademark=2479532
"SATLAV"??? What the fuck?
Yeah, source for the story itself is the BBC, but the quote comes from the blogger, Adrian Short. Not only is our fictional tourist named "Bogus", but she complains that the font on the magnet is "not sodding Arial", which should set off at least three warning bells in the reader's head.
I see the irony sleuths are hard at work.
@Girl -- Thanks for that link. Satlav is an interesting and potentially useful service. You text it and it tells you the location of your nearest public toilets, for 25p.
Shame it doesn't work with the Three and Virgin mobile networks.
@Adrian -- Forgive my cynicism: if Westminster were interested in actually getting rid of the public urination problem in London -
"Every year 10,000 gallons of urine is at risk of ending up in the city’s streets and alleyways through irresponsible and anti-social behaviour." (Sounds like a normal Friday night in the West End, to me, ugh.)
- then perhaps their service could be free –and openly accessible from all cellphone networks– rather than charging people for the priviledge.
Maybe it's time someone hacked Satlav and hooked it up with Google Maps. Just saying, like.
@Girl -- Oddly enough the reason I came across Satlav was due to working on a project to do just that. A few other places have had the same idea, as you can see in my bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/perforce/toiletmaps
I'd like to get the country's toilet location data into an open content database for anyone to use (eg. Open Street Map). If people want to build paid-for commercial services around that, fine. But there'd be plenty of free alternatives too.
the part I don't get is...aren't these signs public domain? aren't they produced and designed w/ taxpayer money?
In the UK, everything created automatically becomes copyright to the creator whether it's the government or anyone else. This is a perennial problem for anyone that wants to do anything with government data.
In this particular case, something odd must have happened. The signs were designed in 1967 and the copyright remained with the designer. A usual contract would have transferred the copyright to the council at the time but for some reason that didn't happen. The designer died ten years later and his estate never bothered to enforce the copyright against the souvenir sellers, who by then had created a whole market for street sign products.
Then along comes Westminster Council a full 41 years after paying for the design in the first place, buys back the copyright and cooks up some nonsense story about their "image" so they can demand licence fees from users of the design.
The irony is that this is a Conservative council -- a party supposedly keen on small government, light regulation and the state getting out of the way of entrepreneurs.
Ah, Britain. Never accuse us and our millions of little Martin-ets of being anything other than glorious fighters in the struggle to maintain our world-class tourist destination status.
she complains that the font on the magnet is "not sodding Arial", which should set off at least three warning bells in the reader's head.
But some of our readers are not yet of sodding age. And did anyone else hear Terry Jones's voice when they read Mariella's comments?
A version of the UK Transport typeface is here.
Here's my attempt at a version link
I worship Mariella Bogus. She is the goddess of tourism.
No harm to mariella but she needs a reality check, she paid £2.99 for a cheap fridge magnet "in good faith" off a stall, what does she expect?
I have to say I laughed out loud at her font checking. Is this a joke or is there someone who really has nothing else to worry about other than the authenticity of cheap and tacky merchandise.
Come to think of it a few years ago I bought a 'I heart NY' mug and to my horror have discovered it is not an original *gasp* - where can I get my two bucks back?
And here's a public warning for any tourists visiting Ireland. In Dublin you can buy little lapel pins of pints of guinness, just so you know, they are not real and in many cases ARE NOT even made by Guinness. I wouldn't want any of ye to be disappointed over shopping ehm unsafely.
Design Week are reporting that Westminster Council paid £50,000 for the copyright to the signs.
Meanwhile if you want to avoid the "unscrupulous counterfeits" out there and stump up £250 for the real thing as a coffee table, Cockney Design may be able to sort you out.