Jakob Fenger

Jacob Fenger, a member of a group in Denmark called Superflex, came to speak with us this morning. Their work mainly deals with copyright issues.

In the first project he told us about, Jakob said they had been thinking about the relationship between the North and South, Europe and Africa. With this in mind, they created a biogas system to create energy for families in low income countries. They then started thinking about lamps and how they really aren't any nice lamp designs for these same families. From this idea, they constructed lamps identical to a very famous, copyrighted lamp that ran on their biogas. They were sued immediately.

They play alot with the idea of what is copy and what is original. In this same realm of ideas, they also did a project with Lacoste polo shirts. Jakob explained that the knock off copies are often times mades in the same factories as the originals. The group attempted to make a copy of a Lacoste polo original by adding the text "SUPERCOPY" stampted onto the shirts. they were also sued for this.

Some other more successful projects (for which they were not sued) include the creation of a soft drink containing guarana, the product of Guarana Antarctica. They make quite a statement by using the company's logo on their bottle but placing Superflex's product name, Guarana Power, over top so that only a little of Guarana Antarctica's shows but it is still recognizable. This was about as much as they could do without getting sued. Another project included a very famous chair design. To make it original, they took the chairs and cut parts of it off. Another still involved creating the first open source beer recipe. The name they gave it translates to "Our Beer." The recipe is free for anyone to use, and you can even download the labels for the bottles.

Superflex now has a series of Copyshops in which they sell their products that deal with the issue of copyrighting.