David Barnett
"I have come to the conclusion that if you want to be a famous disigner/maker of furniture that the only route to this fame is to get many others to adapt/copy your style."

I have to say, Bill, that I can think of perhaps a hundred early 20th century to mid-century furniture designers who didn't achieve their fame by having their designs copied or knocked off, which isn't to say they weren't in some cases copied, but that the copying was not the sole or even primary mechanism for their fame or success.

Would you say "I sure hope someone copies my designs so I can achieve fame"? I dare say Thomas Moser doesn't believe his fame derives from imitation and intellectual theft as much as from his well-protected designs and his aggressive manufacturing and marketing.

Krenov is a special case inasmuch as he promoted his designs and working methods as part of his teaching and writing, sharing his style and the means to imitate it with real generosity of spirit. Other designers, some builders, others not, work and compete at a very different level, often an elite level where the ongoing dialogue of design and their individual design vocabularies set them apart, bringing fame and notoriety without any need for imitators to elevate their reputations. In fact, some designers achieve fame in a one-off or even a prototype alone.

I think too often woodworkers live in a smaller more parochial world of their tools and techniques of making without exposure to the broader design perspectives of those who consider construction as a means to a design end, as Robin Corell points out in this very thread.

The pieces we see in books and magazines devoted to the studio furniture movement of mostly individual craftspersons is where most of our exposure is likely to occur. There's a wide gulf between this narrow focus, a focus where we make furniture before deciding how to design it, and the larger furniture design world, a world which often dovetails and overlaps with industrial design and architecture, where a designer says "I wonder if I were to design a chair, how would I approach it? What should a chair be?"

We simply don't talk as much about George Nelson or Poul Kjaerholm as Nakashima or Krenov, and that's understandable, as they approached their medium from an entirely different ethos and reverence for wood.

So I have to respectfully disagree with your conclusion of imitation being the only path, but it can and does happen that way from time to time.