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Knockoff Tech Selling Better Than the Original
An anonymous reader writes to mention an IT Wire story about the industrious Chinese industry centered around reproducing commercial products. These individuals have become so adept at forging based on the original that by the time the developer of the technology comes to market, the 'original' is seen as 'fake' by consumers. Other products, such as shoes, CDs, DVDs, and even expensive cars are available for much lower prices in certain Chinese markets. From the article: "Sell these products do, especially in Asia where the prices are low, few questions are asked and in many cases, the quality is actually pretty good. Samsung is said to have been so concerned by seeing its phones copied on the Chinese market that it tracked the distribution channels back to the source and discovered the electronics guys responsible for copying their latest products. After offering them a job with Samsung and a chance to go legitimate, they are reported to have declined the offer, saying that they were able to make more money by simply continuing in their pirate ways. What Samsung did next is not known."
Samsung will seek illegal recourse. Samsung is, after all, a Korean company, and all such companies are run by Korean men, of whom the overwhelming majority have served 2 years of mandatory service in the brutal Korean military.
The illegal recourse is to find and kill the Chinese pirate engineers. The operation should follow the rules of the Korean Special Forces and should leave no trails or traces.
The manufacturers of the "genuine" products will need to compete based on price. It seems that being the first isn't a factor in the Chinese market. The only worry is that companies like Samsung could downsize their R&D departments to better compete on price, which would result in fewer innovations for everyone.
In Soviet Russia, sigs read YOU!
Various econimies, as they have started up, have begun by copying other countries products.
Hong Kong, Japan, and now - China.
Oh, and one mustn't forget - USA.
Some time ago, as the USA economy was just beginning, the USA did not respect copyright laws in any way. Notably, they copied books. There were loud complaints from - I believe - Charles Dickens, among others.
As their economies move along, their copies became better, then, eventually, they would start to create inovations of their own.
Then they would start to want copyright laws. And perhaps obey them.
"Cats like plain crisps"
Would you fly on a plane that was built with these knockoffs? It's easy to take the shortsighted position that if it's good for me then it must be good in general. But not always.
I find it interesting that this article used the word "Piracy" in conjunction with all these products. In many cases it appears the products weren't pirate versions of the originals, but unique, new products in their own right that happened to have the same features or in some cases even more features. For example the phone that is claimed to be a knock-off of the LG phone looked very similar, but it was by no means identical. The device that looks like a PSP but has a nintendo emulator and GSM phone built in is quite brilliant, and is in no way a fake PSP anymore than a portable tape or cd player is a fake walkman. To me the product would be pirate if it was produced by the same company off the same assembly lines but shipped out the back door and sold as using the original name, brand, etc, but through grey-market channels. On a general level, IP theft in China by chinese companies doing business with foreign companies is rampant. The question is, though, is that a bad thing? Is this not, at some level, unchecked and enthusiastic entrepreneurialism at work? At some point this is bad, as the Chinese, like the Japanese were during the 70s and 80s, are not really inventing or creating anything new. But the Japanese did move on and now seem to be inventing and creating a lot of things, and I think the Chinese will too. But the question becomes what will become of the West?
If Prada is mad that their own customers don't actually WANT to pay $1000 for a belt then they are free to not charge a $1000 for a belt. It's not the product that's being pirated, it's the logo and the brand.
Because let's face reality. All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated. Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from. Samsung contracts phones to the same lines that copy them. The only difference being that the brand name charges more.
All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated.
Very good point. Ultimately, brands are the creation of marketing more than anything else. Marketing until now has been based primarily on the notion that you must bombard customers with awareness of your brand in order to get them to buy your products. Otherwise, how will they know the difference between your product and that of your competitor?
However, brands to play the important role of giving consumers some assurance about the level of quality of the goods they are buying. A creator of knock-offs can make a series of knock-offs, making money on each product run, whether the product is any good or not. But the brand company will see its reputation suffer if its products suck.
Then again, there are plenty of brand products that seem to survive on marketing alone. The products are no better than cheaper alternatives, and all you pay for is the label. Clothing is a perfect example of this. The design is the same, but add the Prada logo and it immediately becomes 3x as expensive. Granted, Prada has to pay its designers, and the knock-off company doesn't. But there do seem to be some industries that have profit margins that can only be explained by the presence of branding. Remove the branding and the same breadth of products might still be on offer; profit margins for companies creating the designs would simply be lower.
I don't think brands will go away any time soon. Some people simply must have their branded luxury goods. But the availability of cheap alternatives that are as good or almost as good will probably continue to surge. In a world where people can share product ratings and opinions rapidly, the ability of brand merchants to control the market is weaker.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I have chosen to look at Reality, something that's been out of fashion since the 2000 US elections. The realities are that science and technology continue to advance and, as a consequence, abundance increases as cost decreases.
In a sense, the computer represents the ultimate achievement in manufacturing, at least as far as bits are concerned: Infinite abundance at zero cost. You can make an infinite number of copies of a digital work for no incremental cost. You are constrained only by the amount of storage you have, and the available energy to run the computer.
I wrote an essay on this subject over ten years ago, vaguely exploring the economic and social ramifications of such manufacturing capability. I've also posted here extensively on the subject. My main thrust was that defective recorded media (DRM) and other forms of copy protection were childish attempts to wish away reality, and that cheap copying was not only not going to go away, but proliferate. I argued that the economy existing in the memories of our computers -- where a given instance of an artifact was inherently valueless -- would one day "leak out" into the physical sphere. I argued that we needed to be prepared for this day, and that the realm of digital media served as an ideal place in which to try out new economic models and risk/reward structures -- structures and conventions that fundamentally acknowledged that digital artifacts were easily and infinitely copyable. I argued that this day was coming, whether we prepared for it or not. I argued that, if we didn't prepare for it, we would be seriously fscked.
Well, guess what? It looks like it's starting to happen.
We are not yet seeing anything close to computer-like ease of duplication, but even this meager advance in physical manufacturing is already causing what could be serious socioeconomic repercussions. Do not think for one moment that manufacturing is somehow going to get "harder" again. Absent a regional plague or war, this issue is only going to accelerate. Manufacturing costs will continue to fall and manufacturing centers will become more prolific as the technology of manufacturing itself becomes smaller and cheaper. Hell, 3D "printers" have fallen below the USD$10,000.00 mark. How long before you can pick them up in BestBuy?
This is not going to go away, and you are not going to stop it or slow it down with silly little notions like copy protection or WTO/WIPO trade agreements. You need to change your thinking. You need to prepare for this. Otherwise... Well, let's just say the social chaos of today's Iraq will look like a parlor game in comparison.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Sorry, this just doesn't jive with me. The reason why Microsoft is so widespread is because they cater to the demands of customers. A lot of the features in office are there not because of joe schmoe home user, but because of business demands.
Lots of things in apple's OS are nonsensical and resource intensive. For all the apple trolls who say that apples are easy to use, well, maybe they are for beginning users, but frustratingly difficult for anyone who wants to perform keyboard navigation or some such. It's just the layout of the OS that makes it less usable.
As for the "quality" thing, I don't buy that either. Because of the problem of having to work on many different machine configurations instead of one cult-dominated design, Microsoft software will crash more, due to simple probability.
And please don't use the campbell soup analogy; it could be used on apple too.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
"Pirated" might include the grey market, which is products ligitimately produced for another market but imported where it doesn't "belong" (arbitrage). Or, I also heard of a Chinese shoe factory that lost its contract to produce a well-known brand of shoes. So what did they do? They kept making the shoes, ignoring the middleman (the US branding company). The shoes hadn't changed, they simply hadn't been "blessed." A "bootleg" could just be the factory going beyond their order and producing extras. I wonder how far up the chain of command one would have to go in a car company to sneak out a few extra copies?
A chinese friend recently showed me his "iPod nano" knockoff from China.
It was the same size and shape and weight as a nano, but made with obviously cheaper materials. The clickwheel was replaced with a similar-looking clunky clicker. The front, normally logoless, was blazoned with a tacky ripoff Apple logo and the word "iPod" in cheap decal. The color screen was about double the size though.
BUT: The software was cooler. The UI design was all-new, and much flashier than Apple's, and ran in many languages including Chinese and variants. The features included FM radio, video (the screen was bigger and brighter than a real nano's), and audio record/playback.
The connectors were not Apple-style, there was just a USB connection and a micro-phono jack.
The whole tacky package was available, he assured me, in China for about $40. So who would buy the real one?