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China Hires 1 Million People To Fight Fake Products
hackingbear writes "In a sign of the Chinese Government's intention to crack down on the black market, there were about 1 million people employed to remove fake goods from Chinese streets, according to the vice-chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, Wang Jinzhen. Like our War on Drugs, the chance of that succeeding is not very high. 'I don't think it will be completely corrected, but still it will be eased,' he said. 'That's good for China and the company and for everyone in the world.' One key reason why companies keep their R&D departments out side of China is because of concern over IP protection. As an engineer, should we wish their effort genuine and successful? Or as your grandma warned you, be careful what you wish for."
All this will be is a make-work jobs program for China. The only fake goods you'll see stopped are the ones made by people from the wrong families.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
They actually hired 1 man and 999,999 poorly made clones.
Only one million? Really?
How will this affect the cheap stuff I buy from Dealextreme and similar (including Ebay) sites in China, whose wares show up often properly-branded (sometimes even including hologram tags) on my doorstep quickly and inexpensively?
Kid-proof tablet..
pulling 1 million workers out of the private sector and assigning them the job of discouraging trade... it's for the economy's own good!
That's before even starting the debate of whether ip protection promotes growth.
In the end we'll have to stop with all this industrial spying and intellectual property things. Let's just go OpenHardware by default, share our creations and then share the market strategy. This way any insight from any person can be used by anyone, doesn't it sound nice?
Our software company has already black-banned China. We flatly refuse to license any product in China due to IP concerns.
/we know this wont stop them from copying it. It is a deterrant.
It is one of two countries that we have black-banned for legal reasons.
The other is the US. We're not a big software house, and we can't afford the PI insurance to sell products in America.
Knockoffs belong to an earlier stage of commerce. China is now moving into the branding era. Haier, the largest manufacturer of major appliances in the world, based in Shandong, now sells in the US under its own name. Yesterday, BYD Cars, a major automaker in China, opened their US headquarters.
Someday, Foxconn will decide they no longer need Apple.
Soon you too can reap the benefits of American style patent hell.
Better put another million through intellectual property law school.
I love the way stupid ways companies try to discourage product copying. Like the way they insist, no matter the type of product, that knockoffs are a safety hazard.
If you believe these idiots everything from blue jeans to DVDs will kill you unless it comes from the right factory and has a little hologram on the label.
Not to mention that tons of illicit product out there is perfectly authentic; it's just not licensed. Just because a license gets pulled doesn't always mean the owners stop churning out the product, and even while the place is licensed there's often some after-hours manufacturing to make extra money on the black market.
At some point we'll have to accept that intellectual property isn't a natural law; some people and some entire nations won't follow it simply because they don't believe in it, and America won't regain its economic prowess via all of this endless arm twisting, extortion, and bribery aimed at exporting our intellectual property law.
We won't get away with basing our entire economy on licensing payments, Hollywood fantasies, and financial products. The sooner people just accept that the sooner we can start fixing shit.
Many people buy fake items because that is all they can afford. When the fakes are removed the original will cost too much for the average person. It will also be a great opportunity for off brands and local brands. In the end the average person will have to pay more for everything.
...996...997...998...999... Okay you, your job is the keep the other 999 folks honest!
of which 99% are fakes
Seems like PRspeak. China has a working population of about 500-600 million of which probably 300 million are in the manufacturing sector (remove agriculture and services). A 1 million strong workforce means one person for every 300 workers just to check counterfeiting. Something wrong here. I guess these are just buzzword to show how much the Chinese govt is doing against piracy. It signals intent rather than actual implementation.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
Slashdot boyz and grrlz, do get a grip on reality. When the Chines government tells a lie, it is an obvious whopper. It is delightful, really. Well, they have just told a whopper. Nothing to see here, move along.
Seriously, each one that has moved to there, has suffered from extreme theft. Generally, the stolen goods are then sold local and around the world, EXCEPT to America and EU. So, the fools that produce there get one decently sized market for a time and then accepts that. Yet, everybody that goes there loses.
Now, if they would move the engineering there, they will find that it becomes like what happened to Google (stolen by gov. plants inside of your company). At that point, any good stockholder would fire all of the top management, press charges against them for killing the company and then sell the company to Chinese gov.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think this plan will not work and I think that China does not want it to work. I do not want it to work either! Fake hand bags, watches, and so on are a huge tourist draw for China.
I have been all over China, heck my wife is from China. One thing I notices, ALL her girl friends have expensive hand bags. LV, coach, execrate and none of them have fake bags. They spends tons on the real deal.
When ever we go back to China, we normally will buy two are three fakes for our German friends or friends back in the US. I
If you look at the numbers, China is currently the number one buyer of luxury goods in the world. Putting 1 million people to work as IP cops will not change it. The only thing it will do is hurt so many of the low income folks who make their living selling to people like me, who, to be honest would NEVER allow the purchase of a real 1000 dollar hand bag. So, they will not gain any sales.
I get that China wants to change their image, but China is China and I think it will always have it's own values, which are different than the corporate west.
... remove fake goods from Chinese streets ...
And what about the parking garage level that is entirely reserved for a swap meet type environment with the most blatant pirated and fake goods? Some of this stuff has already been moving from high visibility areas to more "underground" venues. All the locals know where to go.
Looking to get bribed to look the other way.
Theft and copying are second nature over there.
As is graft.
One of my clients had their entire COMPANY cloned over there. They never produced anything there. They never outsourced anything there. They never even hired anyone from there. Someone simply set up a shadow company, expropriated all the logos, model names, etc and set themselves up in the business of building exact knockoffs.
It ran for nearly 3 years before someone over there screwed up and tried to be creative (by putting out a product line that wasn't a perfect knockoff). One day my customer gets a service call for a product line they don't produce. They go round and round with the people and finally dispatch a technician from their nearest office (Japan).
All that getting the authorities involved did was cause the company to simply move, change their name and continue making knockoffs. As long as someone's palm is being greased, they'll never be shut down for good.
Anyone even considering outsourcing ANYTHING to China nowadays is a fucking idiot.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Actually, you can never buy the good fakes on the street. You have to "order" them. Normally it takes like 40 min to get the good stuff. Some times, you come with them through a maze of houses and go into one. I dont do this though unless I am with a bigger group.
Best to go to one of the markets and discreetly inquire about a higher quality product. Really, you cant tell the difference. All marks which should be there, all the tell tails. Everything is at it should be.
A country where the public drive over (twice) then ignore babies in the street while they writhe in agony and eventually die due their injuries is a sick place and we need to not be working with them at all.
Chinese culture is an oxymoron. The communists eradicated the Chinese culture and replaced it with communism.
China cracking down on counterfeit goods, eh? First off despite what the article says, I doubt China is really serious about this problem. I suspect it will be just like the problem of how China is "very serious about curbing the digital information available to it's own population," i.e. the Great firewall of China. This prevents information from getting into or or even out China. (My cousin went to China last summer and could not even post to facebook or his own blog) Yet despite China claiming they police their own citizens, in reality next to nothing actually done to control their citizen's attacking my servers on a daily basis. I average 3 to 6 hacking attempts per day. Over 90 percent of that traffic comes from China. Am I supposed to be happy that the situation isn't 10x times worse?
The Chinese government doesn't really seem to be too concerned with efforts make their citizens play nice with the rest of the world... So how are we supposed to believe they are taking the issue of black market / counterfeit goods seriously?
Curbing counterfeit goods or stopping hackers from illegal activity is a moral ethics problem as much as anything and I just don't see the Chinese government encouraging (or enforcing) it's citizens to do the right thing. This seems like another "we're getting tough on crime" PR stunt but in reality it's just business as usual.
At least some big Chinese companies are now starting to build up their own intellectual property and branding.
I'd guess, that's what their Government is aiming to protect.
Good luck with that.
In the long run we are all dead. - John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)
I would doubt that this means a million full-time workers. My guess is that most of that million is people paid a small fee and a commission for looking out when they go to the markets in then normal course of their lives and whistleblowing when they see counterfeits. Obviously, there will be some full time organisers, and some full-time enforcers. But that figure of a million strikes me as a PR figure to tell the world that the government is taking conterfeiting seriously.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Where do you draw the line ? I'm sure the first baker wanted to keep making bread alone. Now you got Monsanto and others trying to patent potatoes. I don't know about you, but when I see that, it makes me want to rip apart a Nokia N900 and build it myself.
pX
Laughable is when China wants to hire a million people to fight fake products. So China makes an online application form. And a script kiddie fills in a million fake applications with different names and mug shots taken from the Internet, but his bank account details. And then fakes doing it.
That's laughable.
Graft and corruption is endemic in Chinese society, so this is more of an opportunity for the newly employed to line their pockets with money from bribes.
that number is pretty insignificant compared to China's overall population. Its like getting 100 people to clean the entire gulf coast. It isn't enough in the grand scheme of things
Until the US signed up to global patent agreements the flouting was huge in the 19th century, then as the economy matured they joined in. China is doing the same.
So your detterent to them copying your software is to give them no option to buy it?
MPAA, is that you? Oh wait, no. Not even the MPAA is THAT stupid.
Next, how to stop shop lifting. Close your store. Stop car theft, bring it to the crushers. I don't even want to know your method for having safe sex.
knowing the facts of the current situation in China and assume that US priacy situation apply to China's priacy situation.
WHAT?!?!?! They're getting rid of fakes?
Won't somebody please thing of the kids? How can I afford to buy my kids their toys?
Sorry son, no "Rego Hally Potter" for you this christmas.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I am an American on vacation in China and I've got a little time to kill so I'm responding to this from my hotel room in Shanghai. Obviously the GFoC is not blocking me from reading Slashdot or responding. For the curious, I have no problems to access the following:
Slashdot
CNN/SI
Yahoo including email
Gmail
Google - works but it redirects to Google Hong Kong and they make it kind of slow to connect
CNN
Fox News
Yahoo Finance
Wikipedia although it's well known that articles about certain "sensitive" events won't come up
Some article redirects don't work. Some news articles off Yahoo don't work, but I don't know if that is a Yahoo problem or not. For example I wanted to read an article about a Pakistani Taliban who got killed by a drone missile and I can't read it at all. The weirdest thing of all is that I absolutely cannot get to Facebook. Really? You're going to allow Wikipedia, CNN and Fox News but Facebook is too evil to allow? Really? Ohhhhkayyyyyy....
I do have Chinese friends and you might be surprised at how much they actually do know about the outside world and about "secret" things their government doesn't want them to know about, like the "sensitive" events I mentioned earlier. My personal feeling is that the Chinese government is playing nice with knockoffs because the US in particular just will not shut up about it. I think they've decided that there's more to gain by playing nice on the issue than turning a blind eye. I can tell you that emails are not monitored by the government unless maybe you use certain sensitive words. Maybe. One of my friends has said some very blunt things in the past to me in email about the government here and never been asked about it. You can't really monitor the emails of hundreds of millions of people in all honesty. On the subject of knockoffs, many times today I was asked if I wanted to buy a fake Rolex at places tourists go to. It got a little old. And yes, it's well known that China does hacking/espionage. However, their own citizens get victimized too. One friend said that he simply will not download anything from the internet any more because he's too afraid of computer viruses and he's actually got pretty good computer skills for a non-IT person.
1 million to stop counterfeiting? how does this compare to the size of the UK's entire _manufacturing_ sector workforce?
no we need work done on fixing old Bridges / old pipes and other stuff.
Please list the ten biggest examples of innovators[tm] whose efforts wilted because of copying.
You might as well say please list something no one heard of because it failed.
Or more to the point, you might ask how many inventions were killed because investors did not invest in it out of the difficulty of protecting IP. The idea that lack of capital starves great inventions consider the following: a few years before the US revolutionary war with England, there were stock offering to develop 1) a machine gun 2) rapid steam powered trasatlantic troop transport ships. Those both failed as stock offerings due to investor flight from the stock market ( See South Sea Bubble Crisis) to understand why. Had those been funded it would have neutralized the main advantages of the colonists.
Since you put your challenge so bold and trolllishly forward, I feel like it's not out of place to respond to it with real allegations that have been made. You may and many reasonable people might deny these but others would stand by them.
1) Linux killing SCO
2) Dalvik injuring Oracle Java,
3) Android overtaking the Apple Iphone,
BS. Any "Nokia" shop I go to here will sell both real ones and fakes. They simply ask you which one you prefer. No need to go through shady mazes or houses.
Please list the ten biggest examples of innovators[tm] whose efforts wilted because of copying.
To be clear: I want ten examples of failure not because the inventor threw his toys out of the pram ("I'm not writing any more music until u guise stop downloading pirated MP3s I'm entitled to more money!!!") but because their efforts became genuinely financially unsustainable.
Easy...
Eli Whitney was driven to ruin after rampant copying of his patented cotton gin. He did not continue inventing.
http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/cotton_gin.htm
Edison slavishly copied Swans patented carbon filament light bulb slavishly.
http://www.coolquiz.com/trivia/explain/docs/edison.asp
Elisha Gray filed his patent on the telephone before Alexander Graham bell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray_and_Alexander_Bell_telephone_controversy
But I doubt anything could convince you. But in the mean time please stop using the telephone, or lights or wearing cotton.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
there were about 1 million people employed to remove fake goods from Chinese streets
So, no one trying to stop the many more fake goods that are being exported then?
The Republicans and Tea Partiers who want government out of business forget that business relies on government operating the market place thru intellectual property laws and contract law and ensuring a safe, non-counterfeit money supply. When CDOs made all the money counterfeit, the rich got bailed out BY GOVERNMENT and still the Koch-sucker bros cry about too much government. Move to Somalia and try to get rich there with a government-ensured marketplace to sell your wares in.
Right in Beijing you've the got (in)famous Silk Market, which is packed full of every fake leather good you can possibly imagine. You can buy Hermes for a few hundred bucks, or Chanel fakes, or whatever you want. Some of the fakes are of high quality; most are crap.
Will the Silk Market disappear?
Looks like China isn't cool with the USA cornering the market on endless, unwinnable wars.