In an October 14, 2016 profile entitled “Meet the Artist/Lawyer Protecting Hello Kitty’s IP,” OWE’s Linda Joy Kattwinkel spoke to The Recorder about her career path as both artist and attorney, and how she helps companies and individual artists protect their intellectual property when images are so widely available on the Internet.
In replying to a question about her background as an artist, Linda notes, “I’ve been an artist as long as I can remember. In second grade, my teacher called up my folks and said, “Get this girl to an art teacher.” So that’s always been my primary identity. [After college] I eventually moved out to Los Angeles to participate in what was then called The Women’s Building. Judy Chicago was one of the founders. As I got more involved in that, I got less excited about my commercial art side and got more interested in my personal art side. I ended up in a typography shop. I met my husband in that field. We both saw that our careers were about to be extinguished by the personal computer, and that’s when we decided to send me to law school.”
Later in the interview, Linda is asked about the common issues that her clients face. She replied, “It depends on which clientele we’re talking about. For corporate clients like Sanrio, which owns Hello Kitty, the issues that I work with a lot involve innocent infringement by younger people who don’t understand the concepts of copyright and trademark ownership . . . . The whole Etsy generation, they just think that cultural icons are there for them to use, and they don’t understand that corporations like Sanrio license these things. But the individual artists also are facing quite a bit of online infringement. And in that world, sometimes it’s corporations who are infringing individual artists. It’s so easy to just go online and see something and take it. A lot of these are larger clothing companies or handbag companies. They solicit or they get submissions from various freelancers, and frequently what we’re finding is those freelancers are the ones who are going online and copying people’s stuff.”
The full article is available to subscribers to The Recorder here.
