Are you going to go through the many years of schooling and/or decades of practical applied crafting that it takes to make a worthwhile piece of furniture?
So let's say you do that. You make yourself a really great piece, and your friends want to buy it because they didn't want to suffer the 10+ year path to making something worthwhile. You start selling to your friends, but then Walmart comes and makes a near replica at a quarter the price through economies of scale.
You wouldn't be upset? Would you make another piece of furniture? Would anyone else commit to 10+ years of craftsmanship to learn to do so?
This seems pretty straightforward.
For example, since clothing is much too necessary, universal, and functional, there are no patents or copyrights on clothing design. I think that's a good thing. The only thing you can do with clothing is trademarks, so as long as a similar-looking garment doesn't say it was made by some other designer, I don't see a problem with copying clothes. Why does furniture have design patents?
Design patents cover similar designs as the original, and there's no need to demonstrate that they were copied. How does punishing "independent invention" (legal term for utility patents) help us with design patents?
how about designers adopting to the new technology and selling personal use models that will work with standardized printers. The allure of most furniture is in the craftsmanship and I seriously doubt any 3d printer will be more that the quality of deck furniture and cheap deck furniture. Its like having your own IKEA furniture printer, minus the cushions and such.
whats next, limiting utensils and dinnerware? Chairs are generic, tables are too, your not going to put a designer out of business with your 3d printed chair.
Switch your scenario the other way around because the reality is, the laws benefit larger companies more than the small indies. A lot of people in US didn't patent their ideas because it cost money to even start the patent process with a lawyer (you have to pay to research prior arts and so on).
Your scenario switch: A company built and patent that same furniture design and you as a small time designer can never sell that design with your own improvements on top of it for practically over 100 years. You cannot improve on a basic copyright unless you have permission. You can end up in a scenario where a massive amount of copyrighted designs are owned by a single company and there is nothing anyone can do for 100+ years.
The original purpose of the copyright (in US) was to push the society forward by promoting the arts and science by protecting the creator's work for a limited period of time, so everyone's motivated to create original stuff. Society suffers from extended protected terms. I'm okay with protecting the person's work for 10-20 years once the work is done, but there is no justification for 100+ years. I don't care if that person goes out of work in 20 years, it's not up to us to protect him for life.
In this age with ~7 billion of people, the right of one single person (or one company) over hundreds of millions of folks is no longer sane.
This law's still bullshit, of course.
I don't see how it is an advantage to allow people to rip off original designers, present it as their own work and charge a premium.
A design patent (and a regular patent, too) can be broad enough to cover all the obvious solutions to an obvious problem. Even if it covers things that existed before the plaintiff started working on things described in the design patent, it still costs a lot to defend against it even when the prior art is obvious.
And it appears that in this situation it's the designers pushing for this legislation that are charging a premium.
We don't guarantee that effort equals reward anywhere else. You can go tilt against windmills all day, everyday, and find that either because nobody wanted them tilted (hah) or simply through poor execution, you can't make a living at it.
Why does some work deserve a hundred-year monopoly on anything like it, but other work does not?
Why does designing a chair deserve it, but designing a website UI (not the content) not?
And if building a Web UI out of standard parts (ie legs and cushions in the chair metaphor) does deserve protection, when do other people get to use a slider in combination with a dropdown, or whatever my minor innovation was? How long do I deserve to keep the world from using the standard toolbox just because I was first?
The process of invention, and the domain (chairs, programming, UX design) seem obscure and complex to the naive viewer and yet obvious to other practitioners. Unfortunately our system is based on asking people who do not work in the field what elements deserve protection.
That's what protected slide-to-unlock.