Bill Tindall
The more I think about this topic the less clear it is where the moral line is located. I am not sufficiently talented to design my own unique style of furniture and might not like to live with it if I was. So everything I have ever made is a more or less copy of something someone else made, which may have been in turn a copy of something else. I have folders full of pictures cut from magazines of stuff I might like to make some day and every issue of FWW design books.

From a picture in a Krenov book I made a bow front wall cabinet which I liked which is as similar to the picture as I could make it. I measured a chest of drawers in Winterthur museum and made a replicate fairly similar. I saw a chest of drawers in a gallery and thought its proportions were nice, measured it and made a similar sized chest of drawers of different wood, moldings, and feet. I took a picture of a tray made by someone and he asked that I not reproduce it exactly. I left the handle off, shrunk it and used a different style of feet, but the attractive fretwork was copied exactly, and in all likelyhood this fretwork pattern dates to 200 years earlier. I don't have a clue if any of these behaviors were offensive or immoral.

Do we have to wait for a designer to die before we can more or less copy the designs, or wait 100 years......or what? Should there only be the Krenov cabinets and Maloof chairs in the world that these designers made themselves....for ever? I am left befuddled, but in reality I will shamelessly more or less copy a design I see if I like the piece of furniture and have the skills to make it, whether it was made in 1720 or 2010.

I don't think I have ever seen this topic discussed from the perspective of someone talented enough to make original design and the rest of the world wanting to make stuff they liked.