The Key West Citizen

Today's Women
By DOROTHY ROE
AP Women's Editor

Pirates didn't die with Captain Kidd.

Today's variety don't sail the Spanish Main. They're more at home in the canyons of Manhattan than on the high seas, but they're pirates, just the same, says Carl Fishel, 76-year-old dean of U S. costume jewelry manufacturers.

These pirates steal designs instead of pieces of eight, and they present an ever-growing problem to the jewelry and fashion industry.

Fishel, president of the firm of Frifari, turning out expensive costume jewelry, now is trying out the copyright law to protect designs for which he pays a high-priced staff of artists and craftsmen. But he says:

"It's almost impossible to protect an exclusive jewelry design in this country. We can take out patents, yes-but by the time the patent comes through we are through with the design. A design is good for only one season.

"Now we're stamping every piece of our jewelry with a copyright sign, so copyists can't claim they didn't know it was copyrighted. We're testing this out in the courts, and we'll see how it works."

All a design pirate has to do, says Fishel, is buy a piece of expensive costume jewelry in a retail store, make a cheap cast of it and start turning out copies overnight.

The same sort of piracy plagues the dress industry, where "copying down" the season's successes in upper-bracket styles is common practice. A week or so after a $200 dress is shown, copies will be rolling into shops at $14.95.

Things are different in France, where, says Fishel, you can get a policeman off the street to arrest anyone copying an exclusive design in jewelry or clothes, and secure an immediate court injunction.