Dale Chihuly, thought by many to have only a peer in Tiffany’s Glass Works, has sued two glassblowers who worked over a decade for him at the Chihuly Seattle Glass Works. Chihuly alledges copyright infringement against the two former collaborators claiming that the two glass blowers were merely ’scribes’ of his, Dale Chihuly’s, copyright expression.

Chihuly claims that the two glassblowers have infringed his signature sea images, specifically the lopsided, off center, sea figures and sea gardens for which Chihuly has become famous worldwide.

Son of a Tacoma, Washington butcher, Dale Chihuly has not blown glass for 27 years since two accidents, surfing and automobile, impaired his sight and range of motion. Chihuly authors the images by sketching and other two dimensional renderings of that which he instructs the team of over 50 glass blowers at Chihuly’s enormous, former boat manufacturing house, ‘Boat House’ on Lake Union in Seattle Washington.

This case will frame the copyright doctrine of ‘idea/expression’ and will include the recent 9th Circuit case of Satava Glass in which a glass jellyfish encased paperweight was found uncopyrightable as not expression, but one of nature’s ideas made manifest. On the other side, there will be arguments that some minimalistic expression is so creative and original as to warrant copyright protection, such as Picasso’s spare line drawings.

This entry was posted by Kate Spelman on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 11:36 am and is filed under Copyrights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.