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Faking a Company
gambit3 writes "What happens when pirating a movie, an application, or a game is not enough for you? Well, you take the next step and pirate a whole company. It happened to Japanese electronics giant NEC. Counterfeiters had set up what amounted to a parallel NEC brand with links to a network of more than 50 electronics factories in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan."
All I can say is, wow, that is incredibly cool! What moxy! What an idea!
These guys should get a criminal Nobel or something!
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Some guy with a garbage bag of Sunglasses and Watches is a bit different then a company manufactoring goods on a massive scale and selling them in stores?
You know the guy with a garbage bag of the product is bullshitting you. But what if it was in the Sunglass Hut (tm) ?
No... this kind of thing almost never happens.
Usually fakers just do what you said - use the name. They don't set up an entire outsourced manufacturing base with a global distribution arm reaching as far as Africa and the EU.
... so why does NEC seem so upset?
This is not supposed to be called piracy of a company, it's a trademark violation, unauthorized and fraudulant usage of the NEC trademark. The affected factories claims that they have papers to prove that they were licensed to manufacturer the goods, but the papers were faked, which is considered fraud. The term 'piracy' has been utterly bastardized and overused already, please be more specific.
Please direct all bug reports to
-
andProduct Sourcing
Buy Risk Free From China IVELL - Global product sourcing
www.ivell.com
Quality Manufacturing
Plastic, electronics and metal UK Management, Chinese Factory
www.motiontouch.com
More Questions anyone?
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
That show's you can copy & paste the article.
The GP was asking you to read the article.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
If the involved factories indeed were producing under what they thought were real licensing contracts, then it's more than just faking a consumer brand. (Now, of course the involved factories and other parties can just benefit by claiming that they were in good faith, but there might be some truth to it in some cases, who knows?)
Did they pretend to be NEC in wholesale deals with other businessmen and the other businessmen did not they were dealing with them? I did not find it in TA.
Only because you didn't READ IT.
These records showed that the counterfeiters carried NEC business cards, commissioned product research and development in the company's name and signed production and supply orders.
Some of the factories that were raided had erected bogus NEC signs and shipped their products packaged in authentic looking boxes and display cases.
etc, etc
Oh no... it's the future.
Not quite. While Oakleys, Rolexis and other knock-offs have been manufactured for a while, this is a whole different ball game. These individuals actually lease property, negociate with suppliers and establish sales relationships in the name of NEC. They do all this under the flag of the firm's proper brand name, not some mispelling. Those are two very different scenarios. It's kind of a neat scam. It will probably inspire con-artists everywhere to try something similar. I could just imagine someone faking Hilton. They could order a large quantity of samples from a few suppliers - and pay upfront for the samples to build trust. The scammer later says they love the product and then order 5 cargo containers from each supplier on 30 days credit terms with a forged letter of credit. And then Bam! They disappear with a few million in goods to never appear again.
Ok, the article states that a "network of more than 50 electronics facotires" were chruning out these immitation products. I understand that this is probably larger and more damaging that a few fake sunglasses, but the issue is still the same. Until everyone (including China) adheres to trademark laws and such, these kinds of things should come of no surprise.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
TFA:
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Exactly. This was a very well-coordinated and well-conceived plan, not something down in the backyard. This was done in the open with, as the article noted, "official-looking documents", passes, ID cards, etcetera.
This is just taking piracy to new levels. This would have taken a lot of effort, but I'm sure that it would be increasingly commonplace in years and decades to come.
As a few people have said, slapping a bodge label on a bodge product in a bodge market is something, but producing decent-quality products, as the article infers, in proper factories and sold in proper shops and retail outlets is another.
Read the article. They're not talking about putting a NEC brand on one or two shoddy items. They're talking about setting up a company and pirating the entire NEC image.
They were placing orders with factories using the NEC name. They commissioned R&D, their factories had NEC signs on the outside. They even designed and built their own products.
This is a huge step from the guy selling Oakley sunglasses. By faking the company and not just the product they were able to get their goods sold in legitimate outlets, right alongside genuine NEC products.
When you start to think about it, the scheme works on so many levels. Ordinarily you run a huge risk to create a factory producing fake goods and everybody in the factory shares that risk. That means it's massively expensive to set up and run, your staff are sub-standard and there's always the risk of blackmail. By creating a fake parent company and just ordering the goods from 'legitimate' factories, they bypassed all these problems. You've now got good cheap staff, proper management, and all in all a far more efficient service.
Even better, now the police can't prosecute these factories for producing the goods since they've done nothing wrong - they've just fulfilled orders as normal. Of course they'll have to stop production and will have their goods confiscated, but their insurance will cover that... The police have no choice but to go for the parent company. Fair enough you've now got to collapse that side of the operation but you've got nowhere near the costs. A few staff, some nice headed paper... sure beats loosing a factory.
Plus, you're no longer selling cheap pirated goods on the street. Instead you're able to charge full retail price.
In one fell swoop they've cut the costs of producing goods, made production more efficient, sold them at a higher price, and managed to legally insure the vast majority of their pirate production line against the risk of getting caught.
Genius, sheer genius. Yes it's illegal, but you can't help but be impressed. Somebody somewhere deserves serious Kudos for coming up with this.
I was looking at a chinese electronics manufacturers page some time ago, and they had a bulletin board.
One of the posts effectively consisted of "Can you make me some tv's branded panasonic and send them to north africa"
Tip of the iceberg, perhaps.
Why did they go through all the motions of creating a distribution network but only pretend to be one company? And why NEC? NEC isn't really much of a player anymore in the consumer world, they are more into industrial grade manufacture and IT consulting. They still do make consumer electronics, but they hardly seem to be the companies bread and butter anymore. Nor are they dominant in the field, TFA goes on to say that some of the products weren't even close to anything NEC currently makes. Why not also claim to be Philips or Sony or Samsung?
Monstar L
Hi, Bill Gates here. I'd like you to visit my new site:
http://www.m1cr0s0ft.com/
This is exactly what Microsoft did to IBM's PC software division in the 80's!
I always knew there was *something* underhanded there, but couldn't put my finger on it.... ^_^ Contract, schwantract.... No company, not even IBM, could have been that stupid. It was all just "Corporation Piracy".
It all makes sense... DOS, CP/M, and, of course, once MS had made enough money from the theft they started taking less and less of IBM's assest - with the last partial theft in the Windows 95 + OS/2 Warp releases... from there, Microsoft could just keep heaping "original" code onto the DOS codebase it secreted away.
Ahhh, all is right in the world when everything finally falls into place!
(Disclaimer: This is a joke. Sarcasm. Humor, people. We all know the real facts..... or do we???)
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
Ooh, piracy. So, anyone got a link to the torrent?
I've been faking being an employee for years :o)
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
It was already done, here, in the US: it was called "Enron".
I guess my post was still useful, to bring upfront the relevant passages from the article. :-)
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
And I thought the guys who claimed to work for the railway company and started removing the rails of an abandoned line not far from where I livedhad been something!
The hired local companies for transport and even distributed leaflets to the people in the neighbarhood informing them of the upcomming works! They made some money from the scrap iron before anybody noticed!
How do we know the reporters were getting comments from the real NEC executives?
An aquaintance recently went to China to visit a factory that makes the sony bean mp3 players. They told him they could make the players for him and just leave the sony logo off it. He then plans to sell them on ebay.
I tried to explain how bad an idea this was and how there are so many other legal ways to invest your money, but he wouldnt hear it.
So there is a use for the MikeRoweSoft name after all!
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Just a thought. Seriously though, if I was NEC, I would try and by up the fake company and continue to operate it. you could probably get it for pennies on the dollar and you already have trained employees.
Assets = Owners Equity - Liabilities
So... these people set up a company, did legitimate business, developed products, shipped and sold products. They did everything any other company does, except come up with their own name and logo.
Perhaps these "official-looking documents", passes, ID cards, etcetera, *were* official. Perhaps they were just issued by the bizzaro-NEC that was stepping on the real NEC's name. That's could still be nothing more than trademark infringment.
There is nothing here that even resembles piracy, or copyright infringment, or theft. These people used the NEC mark, and the real NEC is pissed. These guys were able to exploit the ease with which NEC could close business deals for manufacturing, or marketing a product. They have been riding in on the coattails of a large company with an established brand *by infringing their trademark*.
I'm no legal or finical expert however, wouldn't your 10 000 friend be legally required to pay taxes on their $1 000 000 of stock? I was doing a quick look at the fortune 500 FAQ, market cap is equal to the number of shares times their value as of such and such a date. Therefore, the shares have to actually be worth $1 000 000 or you company will have a market cap of $0. If they are therefore worth $1 000 000, then your friends have each been paid $1 000 000 and would be required to remit taxes on it. Since the stock is really worthless, in that they can't sell it to anyone, they would have to use other sources of income, aka their real jobs, to pay for the tax on that $1 000 000. Good luck finding your 10 000 friends willing to do that. I don't think the taxation office takes "it was a joke" as an excuse for not paying.
Why should they have all those good confinscated? There should be an injunction placed on the sale of the merchandise, and they should be required to be relabelled to not violate NEC's trademark. *THERE IS NO PIRACY IN ANY FORM.* Nothing was taking from NEC, NEC lost no property or money. A company was masquerading as NEC, and taking advantage of the name. That is trademark infringment.
If they change their name from NEC to NAC or something, they should be able to keep on going doing business. Then you deal with the infringment of the NEC mark in court, and figure out what restitution is appropriate.
Also, "Kudos" is a snack bar when you use it as a proper noun. They do deserve some praise for getting their sneaky plan to dispatch with sales channel agreements and advertising from their costs, but they can buy their own food, thank you very much.
Everytime I go to China I always buy a ton of counterfit goods. The stuff is quite often of excellent quality, sometimes even better than the original. I am talking about things like shoes, bags, clothing etc.
I am not so sure about electronics and counterfit media, except for movies, that are usually DVD rips. DVD rips actually work better than commercial DVD's as they don't have encoding on them -so no complaints there either.
I heard from a reliable source, that many western companies have been forced to enter the Chinese market by counterfitters presenting them with products identical to their own at trade fairs.
They have the choice of getting into a joint venture, or competing with a counterfitter at unequal terms. Or rather, not much choice at all.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Firs of all, crime when organized were always coming up with quite elaborated (far from genius) schemes that inspired many art creations. The reason for existence of those "geniuses" is slackness of the government and business culture in particular region.
What is exactly so "genius" in this scheme? Since when pretending to be someone and going very far in it is "genius"? How long would it take for their unsuspecting wholesale partners to verify the identity of the entity they are dealing with? The reason they did not do that is simply this: they did not care.
In Russia, in nineties, there were similar cases in spirit manufacturing. I do not think this is something new.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
So here's an excellent opportunity for poetic justice - NEC should turn around and *really* order those products from the innocent factories, and market them for themselves... Someone else has very kindly done the research and product development, and the products obviouly sell fairly well. The article says the bogus NEC products were of generally good quality, so why not pirate them back??
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I'm a fan of NEC's burners and happily recommend the brand to my friends. Good stuff.
One of these friends said "Wow, I am sure am glad I get my NEC stuff from a reputable online dealer, like Newegg!"
My question is, where'd Newegg get these drives? Did their distributor vouch for the goods? How about their distributor's distributor or the originating factory?
When somebody up the chain said "I _KNOW_ these are good drives" and vouched for them, then that product carried that credential all the way to the end users and that's what we're trusting. But we don't know, really.
"It came from Newegg" might be nice sentiment but Newegg probably has no idea if they were selling fakes or not. I don't think they would knowingly do so, of course. That kind of cheap money is not worth the hassle with an IPO in the works.
Sig for hire.
Many of these pirated items were not part of the genuine NEC product range.
:-)
In other words: The criminal version of "embrace and extend". Plus, of course, it avoids direct comparison which would threaten the appearance of authenticity.
Genius, pure genius.
Also note that the article says the goods were generally of good quality. I wonder if NEC - provided they had known about these before starting criminal investigations - would've simply bought them out instead, expanding its product line at the same time.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Uhh.... What about the various products they "stole" - by way of not having to do the research and design needed to "Create" a product. The company did steal something. As has been pointed out, the entire operation deserves some sort of admiration however. Sure, Trademark infringement is apart of this. How else could they have done what they did without the NEC name? It may even be the biggest part because it being the only way it could have happened (possibly). However this company did steal something other then just a logo: they stole R&D.
- Set up pirate version of their own corporation
- Order parts from existing suppliers
- ???
- Profit!!
--Sig arrêt
It is quite simple compare business case number 1:
1) Buy generic mp3 player innards off general market for next to nothing
2) Wrap iPod shuffle lookalike plastic
3) Sell as iPod
4) Profit
Compare with business case number 2:
1) Buy generic mp3 player innards off general market for next to nothing
2) Pay designer to design a cool funky faux iPodesque white plastic exterior
3) Pay huge international marketing firm to make worldwide humongously expensive marketing campaign
4) Rummage through garbage for scraps of food, use cardboard for shelter
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
If someone comes from NEC and places a large order, and pays, what are you going to do? Ring up the national NEC number, and query it? Look for their picture on the website?
Why would you even question it, unless they came of rather dodgey.
Honey, fake me a company
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Read the article... They did their own research and developed entirely new products for which no corresponding genuine NEC product existed! Which makes the whole thing all the more bizarre...
Well, now that this has been in the news, yes, you will to all this, and still not fully trust them!
So, in a way, NEC may have shot themselves into the foot here by making this public. Suddenly they will notice that it will be much harder to them to establish new business relationships as everybody will wrongly question their authenticity ;-)
This article has the ere is no need to
most hard to read create a stupid column
format for the text based layout. These
I have ever seen. The guys should be shot.
web != the newspaper, th-
And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny.
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
The "fake" NEC is not just a shoddy backwater pirate, they put quite some effort on the scheme. They didn't merely copy genuine NEC products, but did their own research, came up with new models with better features, etc.
The only thing they didn't have, is deals with the content industry that restrict what kind of features they may offer to their customers. Unlike a real company, the fake NEC had no reason at all to honor CSS, HDCP, ... or any other kind of annoying DRM. However, they still had an interest of pleasing the customer.
The FA actually implied that some of the products being sold were knock-offs of legitimate NEC products. So can we quit the "There's no piracy here" meme? Copyright infringement, which is one of the definitions of "piracy" according to 99% of dictionaries for the last God-knows how many years, certainly has occurred.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
...there's a place near here that's doing the same thing with a whole industry/product line - couterfeit food. Luckily, they're easy to spot, all being labelled with a big bright yellow M,...
NEC to NAC- are you Dutch?
What's amusing is the amount of gravity that the statement 'a network of more than 50 electronics factories' is given. That's like saying 'he's ordered from every major online distributor in the U.S.!'. In this day of commodity everything, any of these places will manufacture whatever you want if you throw the data at them, so if anything, that just shows the length of time this scam had been running. The fact that they had placed orders with more than 50 factories doesn't make those more than 50 factories complicit in anything, just in completing orders from Bizarro-NEC.
When hub is Bizarro-NEC and the spokes are the 50 factories, that's not a network, that's one company doing business.
$0.02 deposited
To get a slightly more traditional web format on IHT articles, look for "ARTICLE TOOLS" on the left and click "CHANGE FORMAT".
Pirates are in the business for the same reason as everybody else, to make money.
The soon find out that if they move up the product chain, they can charge more and make more profit.
Look at the pirate DVD market in china. First it was just shabby envelopes with badly copied covers. In just a few years, they had moved to products that counld be sold next to legitimate products.
This is just another example. They probably started off pirating some small NEC part, and it just kept growing and they had to make the fraud look more and more realistic over time.
-- I doubt, therefore I might be.
Of course, once this 'faked company' meme has taken hold, the multinationals will exploit it to the full by making sure all their outsourced third world factories and production centres can be turned into 'pirate' factories at short notice:
... that's not us! Yeah, that's it! They're a bunch of pirates who made a fake MegaCorp factory! We've never seen those guys in our lives! Officer! Arrest that factory! Secretary - type me up a shoddy-looking forgery of our licensing agreement. "Fake" factory workers - You're all fired! Back to unemployment and poverty for you!
Bleeding heart liberal type: You're running sweatshops and paying 12 year olds 10 cents for an 18 hour working day! You're pumping toxic chemicals into the drinking water supply! You're making defective products that explode and kill people! You bribe politicians!
Your factories are run by fascist thugs who hire death squads to kill union organisers! And we have proof this time! You're going to jail at long last!
CEO of MegaCorp, your friendly neighbourhood planet-raping multinational: Errr umm
Third World Workers: Sigh. Shafted again...
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
A WIC-1DSU-T1-V2 is $1,000 list, $700 or so to a small reseller in distribution, and $400 for a clean used unit from a reliable aftermarket dealer. Go look for that part number on Ebay and check out how new boxed product is 15% of list price
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
The only thing to distinguish the scammers from the real NEC is that the real NEC people (can) have @nec.com email addresses, and the scammers can't. But perhaps they registered nec under an obscure TLD? (No, I did not RTFA...)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
That's all; it's back to stamping Logitech nameplates for me...
Pi Ran Out
This is news? The Yes Men have been doing this for a long time. http://www.theyesmen.org/ Pure genius. :)
This is a totally ridiculous story! Japanese have been well-known about industrial spies for many many years then they received what he sent.
Just an example, before 1980s Japan was pretty crap about Chinese medicine making and China manufacturing. They just sent lots spies into China for "technical disscussion". Nowadays, the market share of Japanese is far bigger than Chinese without paying anything.
Yes, I took a brief look about a ripped Ice Age 2 from my friends yesterday. But I would never watch such film even if they only charge me a penny. I believe most Chinese people would still never go to cinema if there is no such DVDs. How f***ing hollywoods can account such cases into their "losts"?
From my point-of-view, nothing wrong about Chinese people do, it is a kind of fair trading and knowledge sharing good for everyone. Linux never make programmers in the U.S. become poor or retired but MS/HP/... do (by outsourcing). IP is pretty bad since it has been abused.
A close relative told me the company he works for has an a little secret that no one talks about. Seems after setting up a partnership with a chinese company to outsorce production (eliminate local jobs) they went to china to further the deal. Production lines were seen, hands shaken, and everthing was going along nicely. Before getting on the planes to go home someone had to return to the "factory" for something they forgot. It sould seem that thieves had made off with the workers and were taking down the "factory". I don't think the theives got too much money, but today no one at X corp. will mentions foreign investment without a quick look and a cautionary tale. Probably just a story told by the middle management to explain a lack of ambition, maybe. Ahh capitalism... don't ya just love the smell?
They can have my command prompt when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
The FA actually implied that some of the products being sold were knock-offs of legitimate NEC products. So can we quit the "There's no piracy here" meme? Copyright infringement...
Copyright law doesn't generally apply to products. At most it may apply to artistic, non-functional aspects of the exterior design, but even that's rare. Note the number of iPod knock-offs that look just like an iPod, except they have to use a different input mechanism because the iPod wheel controller is patented. And they don't say "Apple" or "iPod" on them anywhere.
Unless there are patented components, it's generally perfectly legal to produce and sell knock-offs of a company's products. It's not legal to put the company's name on them, that's trademark infringement.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It's ok. We have fake CEOs, and CEO/CFOs who make fake profits.
In China, they have a fake Slashdot, see slashdot.cn, registered to jesse.webmaster@gmail.com. The website even keeps crashing my firefox-1.5.0.2 on linux box.
There you are, staring at me again.
Now that name brands are pretty much all set up solely for R&D and advertising, I'm surprised this doesn't happen all the time.
Back when an NEC-owned factory made NEC brand products, this would have been impossible. Now that NEC gets all of its products made for it by another business, what's stopping that business from selling the same product to somebody else, with or without the NEC.
Take apparel for example. Nike designs and markets a shoe. They send the specs to a factory in china and order 10,000 pairs. What's stopping the factory from ordering enough raw materiels for 12,000 and selling the remaining 2000 on ebay, or to shady retailers? If nike finds out, they'll probably never do business with the manufacturer again, but if the manufacturer doesn't get greedy, they might be able to skim 20% for years. And they get all of nike's profit.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
The only thing to distinguish the scammers from the real NEC is that the real NEC people (can) have @nec.com email addresses, and the scammers can't.
1) Why would you post a comment when you haven't Read The Fine Article?
2) According to your scam-detector rule listed above, the people at "nissan-usa.com" must be ripping off the auto manufacturer that produces the Maxima because their email address does not end in "nissan.com"....
This isn't the 1960s any more, and we're talking about NEC, a major electronics manufacturer. Unless the fraudsters were substituting their own firmware, microcode, and other copyrightable components of goods they were knocking off, they most certainly were engaging in copyright violations.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
They are worth $1,000,000 if they get traded for $1,000,000. So let someone sell his share for $1,000,000 and buy it back for $1,000,000. Here we go. Low volatility in the stock though... Two shares traded (the same twice).
What happens when pirating a movie, an application, or a game is not enough for you? Well, you take the next step ...
you say that like faking companies was inevitable for movie, app and game pirates... they'll all fake companies sooner or later
why don't you say "what happens when shooting enemies in first person shooters is not enough for you? Well, you take the next step and kill lots of pupils"? thats the inevitable next step for every FPS player (at least according to some retarded politicians on voter-hunt...)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
That's nothing, right now we have a dictator faking a democracy in the US. Beat that pirates!
in the first case
5) remain immune/invisible to litigation and persecution by the MPAA and RIAA for piracy
in the second case
5) be declared an international pariah contributing to the wholesale destruction of the entertainment industries because of your mp3/movie player, be sued by xxAA shills in every civilized state, and eventually have the black helicopters hunt you and your family down as "pirates".
-Styopa
Use javascript to prevent copy/pasting your article to /.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Why bother buying up the fraudulent factories and warehouses? NEC can just sue the organization and force them to turn over their illegally-gained assets, thereby getting all the benefits of a takeover without actually divesting any capital except for lawyer fees.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
Unless the fraudsters were substituting their own firmware, microcode, and other copyrightable components of goods they were knocking off, they most certainly were engaging in copyright violations.
Agreed, if they were copying copyrighted software, then there is an element of piracy.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I think that one is easy to solve. Give each person 1 000 000 shares each valued at $1. This is easy and cheap to establish. I trade you one share for $1. Then you trade me one share for $1. Therefore we both have $1 000 000 worth of stock. I'm not 100% that this actually works but I do believe it does. My original concern though still holds I think, each person would have to pay personal income tax on their $1 000 000 of income, in most countries that would be a pretty huge amount.
Yeah, I am not sure that the real NEC will have to many problems convincing people that they are authentic - for most stuff they would just go through regular channels. For new companies, just invite them to the company headquarters - what they would probably do for a big deal anyway.
Random crazy idea. They should buy the counterfeiters out for a nominal sum in exchange for dropping the charges. If it's that well-organized...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The press was showing off fake iPods last week. Similar looking case, but someone else's stolen off mp3 software.
You're forgetting about design patents. A lot of the iPod knockoffs may violate Apple's design patents; we'll see.
I think the name of the parallel company was Packard Bell... LOL
Speaking of which, there's also a Chinese group trying to fake slashdot: http://www.slashdot.cn which redirects to: http://solidot.org/
If only you could get someone to pirate just the technical support part of your company!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Hope NEC has as much success clearing this up as individuals do.
So is the one with Sony label a fake or the one without the Sony logo?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Extraordinary profits justify extraordinary risks, just ask any venture capitalist
No sig for the moment.
I wonder if you could fake a government... Oh, wait! I live in the USA - we've got that already! My bad!
TFA sure is a crazy implementation of paging!
I want to set up a corporation doing the exact same thing, but instead of basing in East Asia I'll base it on the high seas. Arrrr!
From the article: NEC declined to identify the companies for legal reasons.
I bet that the companies involved were NEC, NEC, NEC, and NEC. It seems pretty obvious to me.
Slightly off-topic: Do you pronounce the name of this company as 3 letters: N E C? Or as a word, neck? I remember working in IT with a guy who pronounced the company as "neck", and it confused the heck out of me for a while. After I was there only a few weeks, he asked me to check out his new neck, and how clear the picture was on it. I couldn't figure out what he meant, and if I should report him to HR for harassment, but then he pointed at his new NEC monitor, and it came clear.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
Cmdr Taco sues Digg for counterfiting Slashdot.
news at 11.
Now what you did not know is that this NEC brand conducting the investagion into a pirating NEC brand is _actually_ the second NEC brand! They are the ones pirating the NEC brand. You wouldn't know it, or really have any way to verify it of course, since the NEC brands have run parallel NEC brands all this time... Additionally the pirating NEC brand who is (unfairly?!) accusing the real NEC brand of pirating their NEC brand, is the one with the better NEC products!!! OMG teh sHitZ hit's the fan!!11!one
Hmmm, this is probably how the Play Station was duplicated. If not, then somebody had a LOT of nerve...
/., but I sometime around last year read that Sony was knocking their head against the wall trying to figure out where units causing high sales volumes but with not cashflow traceability were coming from. Apparently, there was a WHOLE COUNTERFEIT factory in full-swing operation, building and shipping them off. Reminds me of the counterfeit KFC once found in China. Right down to the meat and logos and uniforms.... People called in to verify a franchise and the loc wasn't on the books...
/. imageword "article" funny, considering this "article" is about "counterfeit articles"... heheh
I don't remember if it was on
Hmmm...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
1) You're new here, aren't you? :-P
2) Well, I don't know which domain names Nissan has. I remember the case of a guy named Nissan who has or had nissan.com, so Nissan the car manufacturer might not possess it. So if you want to do business with Nissan the car manufacturer, you might have to dig a little deeper to find out who they really are, and not just be bamboozled by a credible-sounding domain name.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Something is worth what you can get for it. What someone else once "got" for it at some point in the past is only tangentially interesting.
Swapping equal shares is a no-op in most cases anyway, shares tend not to be numbered anymore, so it's not really possible to swap identical shares and have anyone accept that a trade has taken place.