Dear Rich: I am an attorney in South Korea and found your article Licensing Artwork: Negotiating and Monitoring Royalty Payments to be very informative. I write to you today to inquire further about the article. My question relates to the royalty rates for the apparel industry listed in your article. To briefly explain my situation, I am currently pursuing a lawsuit against a counterfeit seller on behalf of my client, who is a trademark owner of a high-end fashion brand. To calculate the damages, we need to determine the royalty rate ranges for the apparel industry, more specifically for the luxury brands. Although the information in your article that apparel industry royalty rates arrange from 2% to 10% was very helpful, more supporting information is needed to submit our data to the court. As such, it will be greatly appreciated if you could inform us about how you derived your data or point to other sources that could be helpful in determining the range of the royalty rates. Thanks for writing to us from South Korea and its good to know that even south of the 38th Parallel, fashion designers are getting top-notch protection. As with so many legal issues related to licensing, we got our rate information from the then-current edition of Battersby and Grimes'
Licensing Royalty Rates. (We also recommend verifying those numbers if possible by talking to someone knowledgeable in the field.) Battersby and Grimes, the legal team that publishes
The Licensing Journal, have a cottage industry of
books about licensing; they also practice law in Connecticut (where they
reverse the names).
