Reki Mayangsari, manager and co-owner of Ladybamboo Villa in Ubud, went to Toraja, Sulawesi, in 1999 and stayed in Novotel Hotel there. When she went rafting she saw the logo she had designed herself, used on the hotel's lunch box. Upon returning to the hotel, she was even more disturbed to see her logo in its Bamboo Bar.
She promptly asked to see the general manager and confronted him regarding his appropriation of her design. Being an honest person and also probably taken aback by Mayangsari's assertiveness, the manager, a French national, showed his good faith by withdrawing the logo from the hotel's property.
A subsequent investigation by Mayangsari revealed that the logo design had come from a local printer. Two years previously, in 1997, Mayangsari was conducting research in Toraja, and went to have some business cards made. Unknown to her, the printer kept the design, and when Novotel contacted them to have a design made, they presented it as their own creation.
Mayangsari's experience is not an isolated occurrence. Appropriating someone else's designs has been common practice in Indonesia. Intellectual property rights have not been high on the authorities' priority list.
On the rare occasion where the original owner contacts the guilty party and threatens action, the copied design is withdrawn and the matter settled out of court. Most of the time, people do not bother. They either do not regard it as important enough, or want to avoid confrontation or expensive legal avenues.
This complacent attitude costs them dearly, as they discover too late that products have been copyrighted by overseas companies. Those who want to manufacture and sell these products then need to pay royalties to those companies.
The growers of Kopi Gayo, a special coffee from Aceh highland, named after the local tribe who process the beans, can no longer sell their product under the name they used for generations, because a Dutch firm officially claimed Gayo coffee as its trademark.
What jolted many people in Bali and East Java is a recent case where an international jewellery company took its former employee to court, charging him with appropriating designs of which the company holds the copyrights.
While the court case is going on, a social cultural phenomenon is taking place. Local jewellery manufacturers are fearful that they will be next, because they discovered that 800 of Indonesia's traditional motifs, 12 of which are Balinese,