Stealing Beauty: Pivot Point International v ... - UW Law School

1072 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW
on a prevailing idea of beauty established in the 1980s. 29 Granting
copyright protection to the artist’s appropriation of this idea, then, allows
the plaintiff to own a standard of beauty that it had no hand in creating.
On the surface, the court only seems to be protecting artistic designs,
however, it is simultaneously stifling other legitimate designs, at least to
the extent that they are reliant on the same standard of beauty.
This Note argues that, while the Seventh Circuit aptly consolidated
several conflicting tests for determining conceptual separability, it has
failed to recognize the potential conflict between conceptual separability
and the merger doctrine, which may allow future mannequin designers to
copyright traditional standards of beauty that they had no role in creating.
Part I presents the facts and holding of Pivot Point. Part II then describes
the development of conceptual separability and argues that the Seventh
Circuit’s new test for determining whether conceptual separability exists
is both a good test and a considerable accomplishment given the relative
murkiness of the doctrine. Part III asserts that, despite the fact that the
artistic components of the mannequins at issue in Pivot Point were
conceptually separable from the mannequins’ functional purpose, the
merger doctrine should have prevented the mannequins from being
copyrighted because the underlying inspiration for the mannequins—the
look of 1980s runway models—is an idea that must necessarily be
expressed in substantially similar ways. 30 This Note concludes by
asserting that, although policy reasons make the decision in Pivot Point
reasonable, the final decision fails to reconcile these two important
copyright doctrines—to the detriment of future artists.
I. HUNGRY FOR THE LOOK:
THE FACTS AND HOLDING OF PIVOT POINT
Pivot Point was a company that developed and marketed
educational techniques and tools for the hair design industry. 31 In the
mid-1980s, it wanted to develop a mannequin that would emulate the
“hungry look” of high-fashion runway models of the time. 32 To achieve
29. See id. at 915.
30. Part III also addresses the Seventh Circuit’s application of Mattel v.
Goldberger to Pivot Point, which influenced the Seventh Circuit to bypass the merger
doctrine in its decision.
31. Pivot Point, 372 F.3d at 915.
32. Id. The court stated that the mannequin heads possess the “hungry look” of
runway models of the 1980s. Id. However, the court never elaborated upon what this
terminology actually means. For the purposes of this Note, it suffices to say that the
“hungry look” was a uniform standard of beauty found among runway models of the
1980s. More specifically, however, the term seems to reference a gaunt and emaciated