Last week Topps sued Upper Deck for supposedly stealing designs from the 1970s for their current crop of cards. Wax Heaven has some images of the UD set, we've used a shot of their Ichiro card, the nerdish Roger Nelson is representing for the 1975 Topps set. You be the judge.
In the world of architecture, derivative works are very hard to litigate, even the slightest change to a design inoculates the derivative from charges of plagiarism. In another hot-button case going on right now, the AP is famously embroiled with Shepard Fairey over his (fair?) use of one of their Obama images. This Topps suit will be interesting to watch, though if the same standards regarding derivations are applied to these cards that are used in architecture it would seem that Topps has little to no case, even as the similarities are pretty obvious.
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UD certainly seems to have borrowed the design from old Topps, down to the black/white piping around rounded corner photos.
Does it matter? Has anyone ever bought baseball cards for the design?
Posted by: Tommy Himself | Monday, April 20, 2009 at 11:46 PM