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...Technically, McDonald's is doing nothing wrong. Since the U.K. rights on the designs of the chairs have expired, this is all perfectly legal. Thanks to U.K. design rights law - which holds that the rights on a design last a maximum of 25 years, instead of 70 as in much of Europe - British furniture stores and websites are legitimately selling copies of the Egg chair, for example, for a fraction of the original's $5,000 price tag. "A commercial decision was taken to use some reproduction similar chairs," Lorraine Homer, spokeswoman for McDonald's in the U.K., tells TIME...
...McDonald's approached us some six months ago to help revitalize and revamp their European restaurants," Fritz Hansen CEO Jacob Holm told TIME in Copenhagen. "We developed Arne Jacobsen chairs in special colors and began deliveries." In particular Avanzi and McDonald's chose The Egg and The Seven chairs, two of Jacobsen's most iconic creations. Jacobsen, who died in 1971, contracted Fritz Hansen to be the sole licensed manufacturer of his designs in 1934, meaning nobody else can make an original Egg (created in 1958) or Seven (1955). Approximately 2,500 of those chairs have already been sold...
...Specifically, Fritz Hansen says that at least two London McDonald's restaurants have installed copies of Arne Jacobsen not made by the company, in some cases alongside their Arne Jacobsen chairs. McDonald's freely admits that some of its U.K. restaurants are using Jacobsen reproductions bought from U.K.-based suppliers - but says it told Fritz Hansen it would be doing...
...Homer says that there are 28 McDonald's in the U.K. that were refurbished in 2006 and fitted with all original Fritz Hansen chairs. By the end of this year, another 100 restaurants will have gone through a "re-image": some using all originals, some using reproductions and some using a combination of both. "While the reproduction chairs are naturally very similar to the original design, there are differences," says Homer. "No attempt has been made to 'pass off' reproduction chairs as originals in any references or labeling...
...That's not good enough for Fritz Hansen, which says the differences are only visible to someone who knows what they're looking for. Anyway, says designer Avanzi - who has had a relationship with McDonald's for almost 10 years and helped bring it together with Fritz Hansen - the use of reproductions seems to go against the food chain's vision for its redesigned restaurants. "The concept was to be authentic, and McDonald's was in perfect agreement with that," he says. "I don't feel betrayed, but poorly misunderstood by a few people in England who didn't understand...