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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?
"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.
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.
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.
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