Stu Nettle

When shaping machines first became prevalent in the surf industry they were target of regular criticism. Mechanisation would glut the market and make shapers redundant, went one argument, while another popular charge took a more metaphysical bent, that shaping machines removed the soul of the design process.

Nev Hyman was a shaping machine pioneer who received his share of arrows. Few took as much flak as Nev did during the formative years of shaping machines. In 1989 after receiving his first run of 100 boards copied from an original, Hyman proactively defended himself in the pages of Tracks. “I shaped the original board and I shaped it without a machine,” Hyman defiantly told then-editor Tim Baker.

Though shaping machines had been around since the 1970s, and a regular part of the shaping process since the mid-90s, board makers were still defending themselves from such charges well into the new century.

The tipping point has been reached, however, and philosophical arguments about the soul-destroying qualities of shaping machines no longer carry weight. Yet all the while, as the surf community wrangled with the ethics of shaping machines, the technology that drives them was inexorably advancing, and the price per unit was dropping. Shaping machines are now sophisticated and widely accessible, and these two factors present a new ethical conundrum.

Recently The Surfers Journal (Volume 24, Issue 2) ran a story about Robert Nichols, a non-surfing engineer employed by Channel Islands to increase the precision of their boards. It's Nichols' responsibility to generate a master file copy of each board in the CI catalogue, and to do so he uses software with the ability to scan 400 data points on every five inches of surfboard. At that resolution no part of the board remains unknown and unquantified. Any digitally-derived facsimile is exact in every discernible way.

In terms of surfboard replication, that's the upper end of the market. Yet there are many different ways to scan a surfboard and get it into a digital format. When I asked my local shaper about the accuracy of scanning he laughed. “Your favourite board will be left with about 200 small texta marks on it but it can be done.” This type of physical measurement could be considered the crudest way to recreate a board, though it's one of the most accurate for older boards. “We can scan straight to file but when we do that it picks up surface flaws such as pressure dings.”

For new boards a simple scan will suffice. “We just scan and save,” says my local shaper. “Then we've got the file in digital format to do whatever with.” And therein lies the conundrum: with that digital file, boards that sell for the best part of $1,000 can be recreated exactly for a much cheaper price.

Much like music files – at least before Spotify and similar platforms came along – surfboard files can be quickly emailed. They can be swapped, traded, or passed off as one's own design. And a burgeoning market is developing around this open source environment.

“We can copy almost any famous model from the main brands.” Says the advertising spiel from The Surfboard Shop, a new Australian/Indonesian business venture catering to surfers travelling to Indonesia. The Surfboard Shop receives files online, cuts and glasses the board in Indonesia, then has it waiting as you pass through Denpassar customs. Finished price, AUD $430.

Similar services are popping up: Boardboxx, Shaping Shack, Disrupt (more about them later), and while Swellnet isn't implying those companies are acting unethically, their scan and shape services - as well as the growing number of surfboard torrent sites - are indicative of the developing open source community where digital surfboard files are conveniently shared online.

When Mark Richards wants to shape a batch of boards he goes through a pattern that is now very familiar to him. He'll make a program file, send that off to California where the head office for KKL is located, which will in turn get sent to one of its satellite offices. The closest one to MR is at Byron Bay, five hours north. Once his blanks are cut they get delivered and MR then sets to work finishing them.

With four World Title trophies on the mantlepiece MR remains Australia's most successful competitive surfer. He's also one of Australia's most successful shapers with over 40 years of experience going into his work. MR is a rare breed, a surfer of preternatural skill and unfailing modesty. A conversation with MR feels like a conversation with King Solomon; wise words imparted in a measured voice without any trace of spite or condescension.

“Shaping machines are the greatest thing that ever happened to shapers,” says MR when I asked of his opinion. “All the excess work gets done. 95% of the effort is taken out. And they allowed shapers to realise the shape they always had in mind and consistently reproduce them.”

Shaping machines were a saviour for long-time shapers such as MR as they removed the elbow work. But despite the savings made in labour, the cost of shaping machines put them beyond reach of most shapers. A high production unit cost around $100,000 at the turn of the century.

“In the old days shaping machines were very expensive,” says MR, “and shapers were reliant on satellite hubs operated by the large program companies. Many, many shapers would be using the same shaping machine and each shapers' intellectual property was protected by the gatekeepers who operate the machines.”

Shaping surfboards is much like any other creative endeavour, ideas freely flow back and forth between adherents and the line between inspiration and plagiarism is often a fuzzy one.

“In the old days you might've been inspired to copy someone's shape” says MR. “So you laid down some cardboard and traced the planshape.” But MR puts a huge caveat on this practice. “It was only so you could reinterpret someone else's design. Put your own slant on it.” MR's justification reminds me of a quote by French film director, Jean-Luc Godard: “It's not where you take things from it's where you take them too.”

At any rate, the shaping machine 'gatekeepers' saw that dubious practices – such as scanning and cutting of competing designs – didn't happen on their machines. They policed the output.

Yet MR notes that things are now changing. “As prices have come down the system has changed. People can buy their own machines.” Reliance on shaping machine hubs is diminishing and it means the boards going onto the market aren't being policed the way they once were. Romantic notions of inspiration are giving way to insidious forms of plagiarism.

“I've heard stories of small labels creating versions of JS, Merricks, and ...Lost, then claiming them as their own.” Scan the pages of eBay and you'll see what he means. Boards from labels you haven't heard of sporting very familiar features: the distinctive cut-off tail of Channel Islands' Dumpster Diver, or the forward-weighted volume of Hayden Shapes Hypto Krypto. Where do they sit on the inspiration-plagiarism spectrum?

“It's very easy for a shaper these days to call themselves a shaper without spending the hours and hours to learn the craft. Commit a lifetime to shaping then have someone come along and scan and save your design? I can't think of a stronger word than stealing, but I feel it deserves to be called something worse.”

In 1993 Derek Hynd wrote an article in Waves magazine encouraging surfers to give Simon Anderson a dollar for every thruster they'd owned. Hynd's idea may have had an element of frivolity – how were people expected to pay?– but there was a serious aspect too. Simon Anderson never sought patent royalties for his 1981 invention and Hynd felt that this was an injustice.

Hynd's dollar-a-board idea resonated with surfers, and not just the ones who bailed up Anderson on the street and emptied their pockets. In the ensuing years different variations of Hynd's statement echoed around the surf community, their endurance a testament of Anderson's popularity but also a symbol of something more profound. That being: shapers should be justly rewarded for their ideas.

The Thruster was surfing's most revolutionary design, yet board design has had myriad small ideas that have got us to our current point. Each incremental step forward was a product of someone's expense and effort. And while surfers have a notional leaning towards a meritocracy – as evidenced by the popularity of Hynd's statement – surfboard shapers have always had trouble profiting from their ideas.

Andy Munro is a Senior Associate at the law firm Slater & Gordon. When asked about the potential for shapers to legally protect their ideas he immediately makes a distinction between copyright and patent. Copyright protects the “artistic work” from being copied by others, while a patent gives “the patentee the exclusive rights, during a fixed period of time, to exploit the invention.”

The criteria of each are similar: 'originality' is the key for copyright, 'novelty' for a patent. “The difficulty for a surfboard designer,” says Munro, “is that most modern surfboards are remarkably similar in terms of their basic elements.” Originality and novelty don't really exist.

As surfers we're familiar with the minutiae of design: a half inch of nose lift, a gently pulled tail, but such subtlety prevents surfboard designs from meeting the requirements of the Copyright Act or the novelty test that decides whether something can be patented.

Even if Simon Anderson had pursued his legal options, Munro doubts he would've been able to protect his invention. After all, Anderson wasn't the first to put three fins on a board, and the magic formula that made the Thruster work – equal size fins, wide tail, pulled nose – wouldn't have been enough to meet the legal threshold.

For seasoned shapers such as Simon Anderson and Mark Richards their experience and their creativity is their currency, yet their designs can be accurately copied without legal redress. Some companies are even encouraging you to do so.

Digital replication isn't always an insidious commercial practice. In fact, it has other non-commercial uses. Damion Fuller is the Australian General Manager of Electric Eyewear, and he's also very well known in the vintage board community. Fuller distinguishes himself with his broad knowledge and judicious curation of vintage boards.

“I've amassed approximately 200 vintage boards primarily for their cultural or design heritage. I'm interested in exploring the validity of the designs that history has passed over.” Says Fuller when we spoke.

Most of the boards Fuller has acquired come from a time before shaping machines were even invented, so of course they were hand shaped. However, he's recently employed the use of scanners and machines to assist with his pastime.

“When I find an interesting design that I'm keen to try, but can't because the board is too beat up or too small for me to ride, I've been getting it scanned, re-sized, and shaped off a machine. My interest is not commercial and I'm not plagiarising instead exploring and celebrating long since forgotten design concepts.”

“Like the biologists in Jurassic Park extracting the DNA of dinosaur blood from mosquitos trapped in amber, I'm trying to bring these old designs back to life so we can look at them with fresh eyes.”

Gary Elphick is the CEO of the aforementioned Disrupt Surfboards, another company that allows users to create a shape then send it to them for manufacture. A new company, Disrupt began operations last year with a plan to live up to their name. Their website says as much: “We believe in using technology to Disrupt.” And so far their plan appears to be working.

“Yes, we've come up against the shaping community,” said Elphick with resignation. “But we've been trying to set them straight. We're not trying to take away the art of shaping.”

Self-shaping is only one aspect of the Disrupt process, receiving digital files for manufacture is the other. Disrupt are a classic example of how modern technology is bypassing the traditional gatekeepers. Disrupt don't even work with a typical shaping machine but rather use a 3D printer. They still receive digital files, though. Would they work with plagiarised digital files?

“There's just no way we can police that,” says Elphick when I posed the question to him. “But whatever we can do to stop that activity we will do.”

Elphick has clearly thought about the issue. “I can foresee a time when something like Google Image Search protects the copyright of digital files,” says Elphick. Till then, however, he has to rely on the goodwill of his customers not to send plagiarised files of existing models.

When anyone can create anything all that's left for consumers to base their purchasing decisions upon is marketing and a competitive price point. At first glance it appears that all creativity has been taken out of the equation. But is that always the case?

Someone who'd disagree is Maurice Cole. At various times during his career MC has been at the very pinnacle of surfboard design, most famously with his forward vee design ridden by Tom Curren and later with his deep concaves. Surprisingly, MC has no problems with the digital imitators, and for a couple of reasons.

“They can scan boards, copy them, cut them, and those board will be 99% finished,” says Maurice of the automatic process. “But I work with the 1%, the fine tuning that no cutter can match yet. And anyway, the imitators are good for creativity, strange as it is to say. They keep me on my toes and always inventing, pushing my designs further.”

The other aspect is something that till now has been overlooked – materials. “Most boards are still straight PU [polyurethane foam blank] with polyester [resin],” says Maurice. “I work mostly with different materials and they give me just as much of an edge.”

"The [surf] industry will move like the music industry and become more focused on digital files," said Gary Elphick in an interview last month. "Those files will be available online and local machines will be able to print them in full."

It's not a partiularly bold prediction by Elphick, it's already beginning to happen, and the disruption that digital files wrought in the music industry - think Napster or P2P file sharing - is having a similar effect in surfing. Advances in technology are allowing the 'art' that surfboard shapers create to be easily copied, recreated, and profited from. Yet unfortunately surfboard shapers, unlike musicians, have no avenue for legal recourse.