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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!
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
This is a downside to manufacturing in China. Even legitimate factories will order parts from a BOM and make illegit items after they fill your order. this is the risk in sending your IP to China to be made on the cheap.
... but if the knockoff alternatives lack the DRM that the authentic products contain, I'd probably consider purchasing the knockoff as well.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
You know, the fact that China has managed to become the manufacturing center it has is rather astounding. They turn around and steal the technology of the companies who have decided to put plants there. Their system of law is simply unpredictable. By and large, companies who moved there should have known better. As irritated as outsourcing to India has been, in retrospect, we should have made a more concentrated effort in making India, rather than China, the mass-manufacturing center for the American market. India has a few things going for it that China probably never will. First and foremost, they have a republican (small r) system of government. They have benefitted from hundreds of years of English Common Law, which is arguably what makes Biz so seamless and efficient (relatively speaking) in the UK, US, and Canada. Finally, they don't seem to have an appetite for superpower status. We picked the wrong country to invest in. If I owned a manufacturing company, I'd get the heck out of China.
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"
This post is a dupe! I read this on www.slashdot.cn last week!
RULES.
China is growing products & services as their engineering graduates do more and more original work, instead of copying.
At some point China will need to enforce copyrights, trademarks and patents so that their local inventive products can be sold on the world market...without copycats in the U.S., EU and elsewhere.
Relevant facts to date:
Right now Assignee companies of U.S. issued patents in China total 2400 or so, which isn't very many, but it is growing.
Almost 7000 U.S. patents have been issued to people residing in China. One can assume far more patents are submitted in China but never have foreign applications.
China graduates more engineers, mathemeticians and scientists every year than the U.S.
Will it go smoothly, soon, or be diligent in giving foreign patent holders the same rights as Chinese patent holders? I doubt it.
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?
Now that China is starting to develop IP of their own it will be interesting to see how they react when other countries pirate it. I doubt they'll say "it's ok."
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Hey this fake cola tastes just like cola! Almost as if it came of the same assembly line....
"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."
I'll never complain about Slashdot editors again.
I fail to follow your reasoning here. I remember when I paid $240 for an 80mB disk. Today I can get 500gB for $240. How could anyone get a 6000-fold reduction in price without R&D? Any cost-cutting the bean counters do is irrelevant compared to what R&D will get.
If a technology company wants to prevail in the marketplace, what they need to do is to keep R&D so intense that the copycats will not be able do duplicate the performance of genuine products.
Stealing someone else's technology and creating a better selling product with it? Microsoft practically invented the concept.
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.
As most of us know, the rules of patents and copyrights are there to allow an innovator to recoup expenses and some profit. We have taken it to the point where the rules are now used to insure financial security for the entire corporation into perpetuity. It seems like now that manufacture is so cheap, and the design process is so streamlined, that the big shops should be able to get a products refreshed pretty frequently. The big reason that large firms cannot is the sheer amount of overhead these mammoth corporations carry. Many will complain, like the car companies, that things like health care adds 5-10% to every car. But how much does overhead like luxury building, private airplanes, and golden parachutes add?
Perhaps if money was put into hiring and training people, and encouraging innovation, we would have nothing to fear from the knockoff artist.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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
No. Windows Genuine Advantage doesn't help the least against imitation.
And honestly, I rather prefer the imitation.
Do not trust this signature.
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
Are you saying my Sorny is not legit? What about my Magnetbox VCR or my Panaphonic DVD player?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It's all about the pricing and availability of goods. Go do an inventory of your house, or even just your bedroom, and find how many of your things are imported.
And now that lower-skilled jobs are being exported over there, fewer Americans can fit the "union tax" into their budgets, assuming the US goods meet the same quality.
Sure they look very similar but fake? The phone isn't claiming to be an LG, or the game a PSP as far as I can see. It's a clone, not a fake. It's not like the phone and other tech manufacturers don't rip each other off mercilessly. Do you believe for a second that companies don't "reverse engineer" each other's products within minutes of them hitting the street? Before if they can find a way get away with it.
Really what they're pissed about is the fact that the chinese are just better at it than they are.
The solution? Release the stuff in China first, nobody wants to be seen to have a knock off. Hell, it has by far the biggest market so it even makes sense.
Deleted
Why the dollar store. Just every foodstore in good old USA. What do you thing American Budweiser is? A badly done fake imitation of the real Budweiser brewed in the Chech republic for 300+ years now.
China is simply undergoing the same process as the USA did 120-130 years ago. The only difference is that American "businessmen" at the time were faking European brand goods while Chinese are now faking Japanese and American.
Nothing surprising here. Once their own brands appear in quantity they will suddenly become trade mark aware. The way the USA did.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
"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?
Beer is a bad example. Brewing is a trade, and trademarks do not protect beer styles. It's a recipe. There are restrictions on what you can call your beer.
Many of the American brewers who "knocked off" European styles were actually immigrants themselves. Adolphus Busch (who we have to blame for Budweiser) himself was a German immigrant, coming to America when he was around 18 and then marrying Lilly Anhueser. Many of their products were somewhat different than their German equivalents, and based on recipes recovered (such as the Classic American Pilsner were quite good. American brewing didn't become terrible until after Prohibition.
On another note, Bud is--believe it or not--very difficult to brew. It's damn hard to remove all the flavor from the beer like that without showcasing other flaws. This is purely anecdotal, but I can think of at least one ex-Anhueser-Busch brewer who has done quite well after going out on his own. The brewmaster at one of my favorite local breweries used to be a production supervisor at Anhueser-Busch, and he makes excellent, flavorful and award-winning beers.
Finally, 300+ years? Budvar has been brewing for much longer than that, but their beers were nothing like they are now . The first pilsners (like Budweiser Budvar) weren't brewed until the 1840s. As an aside, brewers all over the world (including Germany, of course) quickly imitated the first pilsners produced.
But you're right, Budwar Budweiser is a hell of a lot better than Anhueser-Busch Budweiser.
No it won't.
Truth is, we are gonna get exactly what we have comming to us if we don't pull our head out
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?
In India, we also make up stories like you do. But we call them fiction.