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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.