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$200B Lost To Counterfeiting? Back It Up
An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend, the NY Times ran a story about how the recession has impacted product counterfeiters. In it, the reporter regurgitates the oft-repeated claim that counterfeiting 'costs American businesses an estimated $200 billion a year.' Techdirt's Mike Masnick asks the Times reporter to back up that assertion, noting two recent reports (by the GAO and the OECD) that suggest the actual number is much lower, and quoting two reporters who have actually looked at the numbers and found (a) the real number is probably less than $5 billion, and (b) the $200 billion number can be traced back to a totally unsourced (read: made-up) magazine claim from two decades ago."
Trying to get more free money from the government?
Gasp!
I don't see how counterfeit products could do much damage to the US job market. Most of the legit products are made overseas too, right?
Help me fix my brother's injured butt!
Maybe newspaper articles should cite their sources and have a list of references at the end like academic papers do. That way at least readers or other interested parties could independently verify the facts in the article.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
On one hand, they are trying to salvage old media, and on the other hand they are trying to kill efforts like Wikileaks.
It seems pretty obvious.
CNN can just say anything they want, even if it's completely inaccurate and has no sources to back it up. They can just say their source is secret, and nobody is even going to ask.
Wikileaks, OTOH, shows you the actual docs. That's why they are being persecuted as criminals.
Encyclopedia Britannica is written by an unknown number of employees under unknown circumstances, and they cite no sources clearly (In the best case, they just cite a bunch of sources that might or might not back up their claims, and there's no direct way to check them easily).
Wikipedia is edited by the general public, each edit can be easily identified and accredited to a single author, and all sources are directly linked to in most cases.
And yet, Encyclopedia Britannica is considered more credible than Wikipedia, even when it's been shown that it's far more inaccurate, not to mention outdated.
Old media has to die, but the almighty economic powers that run this world won't let it go without a fight.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Oft quoted as the "paper of record", the Times has a history of faking it.
Seriously though, estimating losses due to piracy/counterfeiting is always dodgy since it assumes that a certain number of people would have bought the real deal had the fake stuff not been available.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
The missing element in these claims is the citation of some sort of study that combines an examination of buying power and psychology to determine when piracy or the purchase of a counterfeit good represents a lost sale to the afflicted rights holder and when it does not. You can't just multiply retail cost of original good by estimated number of IP violations; that very likely surpasses the upper bound of the "damage" that has been caused. It's faulty journalism to ignore this fact or pass the responsibility for the veracity of this information to somebody else, but that doesn't seem to stop anybody from breathlessly regurgitating these sky-high numbers.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
We all know that the Federal Reserve prints more money all the time
without anything producing any goods for it.
Let me introduce a little friend I call Hayek.
The whole "back it up" line made me think for a second, they wanted people to copy money to preserve it from counterfeiting...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When they start using rectal numerology to prop up a story like this, I can't help but think that this is a propaganda piece to grease the skids for ACTA.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
This is largely not due to high import duties but due to corrupt customs officials. Fucking hell hole, I'm longing to get out of it.
The place to start with this is doing something like purse shopping. You can go to a Coach store or Prada and find a really nice purse for $1500 and an OK one for $500. Then go to a store that sells similar knock-offs and you can see things that look more-or-less like the Prada ones for $100. Then stop by the street vendor with a absolutely faithful Prada copy for $35.
There are two things that the average Joe learns from this adventure:
What this does is by the mere presence of the counterfeit goods in the marketplace is reduce the willingness of the public to buy originals. It doesn't matter what the "original" is, obviously there has to be a cheaper counterfeit version available. This applies to everything from caviar to computers and automobile parts to luggage.
$200 billion lost because of the presence of counterfeit goods? Easy. The direct losses might only be a few million, but pushing the idea of "just as good as" in front of people pushes the originals out completely.
The "victim" still has their product to sell. It's not like I'm "stealing" something from them.
This article, and:
http://collateralmurder.com/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/16/army_wikileaks/
http://www.examiner.com/x-6495-US-Intelligence-Examiner~y2010m6d20-Censored-news-Pentagon-attacks-Wikileaks-more-gulf-drilling-approved-Fed-fights-reform-more
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_that_have_been_corrected_in_Wikipedia
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html
http://thestatsblog.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/britannica-versus-wikipedia/
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Five billion dollars is still a lot of money.
But put the numbers in perspective.
US GDP $14,260,000,000,000 (2009 estimate, courtesy of the CIA)
$200 Billion equals 1.4% of the GDP
$5 Billion equals 0.035% of the GDP
One is a problem worthy of immediate attention. The other is a problem to worry about when nothing else is pressing.
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
Well then why didn't you reply to it? Oh, wait, it isn't there. I expanded all the comments and ctrl+f'ed Obama, the only three instances were in your post..
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I've said it a thousand times, and I'll say it again: the statistics that the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc. claim are misleading, and very wrong. They are drawing conclusions that suite their cause (wallets), not getting to the root of things. I do not condone outright piracy and counterfeiting, though hopefully this explains some of it. They count every instance of and illegal or unauthorized copy being transferred as a lost sale, or a net loss. This is not so, and I contend that most downloads or sales of cheap counterfeit merchandise are in fact a direct result of ridiculously high prices for legitimate items, rather than a cause of high prices.
Back in the days of cassettes and when VHS was king, I used to get all sorts of things from the local library. I'd often dub copies for myself and return the borrowed copy almost immediately. When we all transitioned to CDs, I kept up this practice. I was also known to download a fairly hefty amount of software from local BBS's, and later the internet. My reason for doing this? I simply could not afford to spend $12 on a tape I wasn't sure I'd even like, $15+ for a CD that might include one song I liked, or $20-$30 for a movie I'd watch once or twice then stick on a shelf. Buy a shirt, a hammer, or a TV, or a pizza that turns out to be crap? You can return it for a refund. Not so with music, movies, software, etc., even if it doesn't work right (in the case of lots of software and computer games). Nearly everyone has bought a CD they don't like, and they are all screwed.
So perhaps downloading, torrents, and p2p file transfers are rampant. I'm sure of it. But much of this is due to high prices and the flooding of the music/movie/software markets with utter crap. Were the opportunity to download for free not there, most of these unauthorized downloads would absolutely NOT translate into sales. I buy a few CDs a year to support my favorite few artists, as I have for the past 15+ years, which is what I can afford to buy. Yes, I download more than that, but if I couldn't, I still would not buy more. I did not buy movies before I could download them, and I never will - not enough re-use value. Software? I use linux and almost strictly free software now, and have no need for windows junk. A lot of people are like me, too.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Well, did the person selling the fake skirts make it clear that they were fake (or at least, did the customers know)?
If so, then all they wanted was a skirt that looked a particular way; they didn't care who made it. Your ex's store, or the designers who supply her, can only try to compete in three ways, it seems to me.
First, quality; their skirts may be made of better materials than the fakes, or may be made with better techniques. If so, try to differentiate based on this. Of course, some people are satisfied with synthetics instead of natural materials, or poorer materials instead of finer ones, or single stitching instead of double stitching, so it won't always work, and the price difference may remain substantial. (There was an interesting article in the NY Times the other day about the Italian fashion industry and wool quality)
Second, price; how cheaply can the real skirts be made? Maybe it would be more efficient to sell skirts out of a van, instead of out of a store that is expensive to lease. It looks like the fake guys are winning on this front, but there's no reason that they necessarily have to.
Third, brand; there may be some cachet that can be used to make money out of the brand of the manufacturer or the distributor. Some people presented with identical products from different vendors at different prices may prefer the more expensive one as a form of conspicuous consumption. (You can see it elsewhere; a real Picasso is worth a lot, but a forgery, no matter how identical, is worth a lot less to people who care about this sort of thing) It can work, but it has problems. Some people don't care about brands, but just want a nice skirt. If the fake is good enough, they'll probably buy it since it costs less than the same thing from elsewhere. Some people care about brands, but are excluded due to artificially high prices set by the people controlling the brands. They'll deliberately seek out the fake skirts in order to most closely approximate the real thing.
I suspect that the ex et al have been trying to compete only on brand, and perhaps partially on materials (although usually brand justifies more of an increase in price than materials). If it's not working as well as they'd like, perhaps they ought to try a different approach?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Assuming the counterfeit dress makes any profit at all, the genuine one must be making at least 380 bucks of profit for a price of 400. That means your girlfriend and her suppliers are getting at least 95% profit margin.
In other words, cry me a river.
Frankly, if your entire business model depends on selling cheap items at insane markup because they're "genuine", you deserve to go out of business. How could you possibly avoid that, in an economic system that's entirely based on using competition to lower prices?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.