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"In fact Kinkade has ? justly ? won the vast majority of the lawsuits which have been brought against him"

By Intellectual Property Law, Esq.

Felix Salmon says Thomas Kinkade is "bad, not evil": "The store owners ... lost money when ... the internet made secondary-market values of Kinkade?s work much more transparent. Suddenly, the enormous growth in past Kinkade sales was no longer a good thing: there were a lot of Kinkades to go around, and many of the buyers were people who bought on the assumption that their paintings would increase in value and they could make money on their investment. Up until the arrival of the internet, that worked for Kinkade, whose company set the prices for all his paintings and would raise them steadily. After the arrival of the internet, a whole industry arose buying and selling Kinkades at market-set, rather than Kinkade-set, prices. And that was the end of the success days for the company: without monopoly pricing power, Kinkade was nothing. The stores failed, ultimately, not because Kinkade treated them badly, and not because other stores were undercutting them. The stores failed because Kinkades are a commodity, and anybody wanting to buy one could get a second-hand Kinkade online at a much lower price than that charged at retail. Buyers no longer believed that their paintings would increase in value, so they bought fewer than they used to. And when they did buy, they were likely to buy already-existing Kinkades rather than new ones."

Full post as published by The Art Law Blog on June 21, 2009 (boomark / email).