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Feds Grab 163 Web Sites, Snatch $21.6 Million In NFL Counterfeit Gear
coondoggie writes: "As they have for the past few years the US Customs department teamed with the National Football League to cut into the lucrative counterfeit sports gear market. In what the feds called 'Operation Team Player,' special agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and officers from Customs and Border Protection worked with the National Football League (NFL) and other sports leagues along with law enforcement agencies to identify illegal shipments imported into the U.S., as well as stores and vendors selling counterfeit trademarked items."
title says it all
Probably made in the exact same factory by the same people.
I love how they call it counterfeit, like it's somehow of lesser quality than the chinese shit they sell themselves.
The AFL-CIO, and any other union for that matter, is a non-profit organization with a lot of pull.
When was the last time we heard about a 21 million dollar drug bust?
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
Because counterfeit football merchandise is such a "clear and present danger" that it rates diverting resources from, you know, actual crime like bank robbery and human trafficking. Maybe the NFL should be made to hire its own private security for this kind of stuff so public law enforcement can get back to protecting the public!
I feel safer already!
Which country are the non-conterfeit items made in?
The jerseys (the good sewn ones) are simply way too expensive. They're upwards of $250-300 and taht's more than I'm spending on a player who might be with the team for 3-4 years. In fact, all the gear and items are obscenely inflated in price. However, the counterfeit stuff is hit or miss. I've got a Woodley jersey that looks like cartoon lettering was used for the player's name. Some items I'm sure are straight off the assembly line. Maybe they ran it another day and sold the extras on teh black market.
The NFL can't be surprised this is happening. When Americans started to realized that goods were being produced at cutrate prices overseas and sold to us as a huge markup, lots of us gave the finger to tradition stores and elected to cut out the middle man as well. I'm probably being hypocritical based on my stand on illegal downloads, but I have no sympathy for Goodell's NFL.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Customer and Border Patrol should stick to enforcing customs laws AT THE BORDER. Once it's entered the country they should have no authority. We've also seen them trying to enforce copyright, as in the recent Google Glass case. They're already out of control at the borders with their warrantless searches, their authority should be rolled back, not expanded.
They also hired there own "medical commission" to ignore the fact repeated head trauma causes brain disease, despite leading neurologists having slices of brain, and findings that suggest otherwise. Any contact sport really, PBS and Frontline ran a 2 part special over the NFL's denial..
Pretty much a monopoly.
I really don't know why the NFL is going through all that trouble. Those elite professionals who even make it to the NFL know damn well the dangers of playing the game. It's not like ANY kid eligible for the NFL draft doesn't know this, or it's some big secret that you can get hurt or killed on the field. I know damn well the dangers of stepping into a 3,000-pound steel box and sending it hurtling down a freeway at 75MPH, inches from thousands of other steel boxes. I still get up and do it, every single day. Not just on Sundays for 3 months out of the year. Every single day.
People put themselves in positions of danger for fucking minimum wage because they have to. These guys make millions of dollars every year for playing a game. A game they love. A game they've dedicated their lives to. I fail to understand the conspiracy here that does NOT carry over to sports equally as dangerous. It's like NASCAR hiring their own doctors to help disprove that concrete walls are deadly at 200MPH. Why the hell bother. We ALL know it's a dangerous sport. If the people engaged in the sport accept this, then who gives a shit.
Often the manufacturers of the legitimate sportswear get a contract to make 10,000 shirts. So to cover the expected rejects, they make 12,000 shirts with the knowledge they'll have 10,000 good shirts to supply to the customer. Now what to do with the 2000 shirts they made extra and/or were rejected due to manufacturing issues (label upsidedown, etc) - they sell them on. They don't get the little hologram label saying its legit, but its made in the same factory by the same people, its just outside of the contracted numbers.
The Feds involved cooperated so much for the PUBLICITY!
Had it been some other copyright infringement, it may not have even happened.
THIS, however, so close to the bowl, generates FREE PUBLICITY in the media.
Kind of like when they send in a SWAT team to a K.C. burb to bust a yuppie household for marijuana because they ordered hydroponic equipment off the internet.
No pot found, but they DID send those teabags to the lab and found themselves a whole lotta PUBLICITY, yup, the good ol boys, cleanin up the county for you.
Lesson: Dont use legal hydroponics or the cops will raid your house, grow outside in the dirt during LEGAL growing seasons or the porkers will confiscate your tomatoes with extreme prejudice.
They realize there is no such thing as bad publicity. Morons.....
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
But the NFL is accused of hiding the dangers of the game from the players. They withheld their own studies which showed links of repeated concussions to a variety of mental health illnesses:
http://www.campbell-trial-lawy...
From the above link:
The NFL Committee did everything within its power to deny any causal link between multiple concussions and later-life cognitive decline. DeMaurice Smith, Executive Director of the NFLPA, described this NFL Committee policy: “[u]nfortunately, the NFL...diminished [independent] studies, [and] urged the suppression of [independent] findings...for years.
This is more like NASCAR hiding evidence from its drivers that repeated neck strain from cornering quickly has severe life altering impacts as you age.
China tends to donate seized counterfeit goods to charity. The US actually sued China at the WTO over this practice, and eventually lost.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
There is a petition for that, with over 300,000 signatures. Go and add yours.
http://www.change.org/petition...
http://www.sacknfltaxbreaks.or...
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
This goes back to a point I have made repeatedly. Wealthy people and corps should pay more taxes because they use our legal framework more often (and it's usually crafted to their benefit).
Cheap storage VM.
The jerseys (the good sewn ones) are simply way too expensive. They're upwards of $250-300 and taht's more than I'm spending on a player who might be with the team for 3-4 years.
Wait, an official NFL jersey costs $250-$300?? Fucking really? No wonder they need the government to enforce their monopoly!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I only buy counterfeit jerseys now and if you find the right source they're rarely much different from the real thing. The only "level" of jersey that shows a great deal of difference is the genuine "on-field" jersey that is supposed to be exactly like the one the players wear. In the case of those yes, the real ones are made of better, thicker material with stronger seams. I can get one for a fraction of the real price though that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing at 10 feet and that's all I care about. I own two real jerseys. Both cost upwards of $250 and both players are long gone from the team I follow. Won't make that mistake again. Buying a real jersey is something you do towards the end of a HoF players career, not on draft day before you know anything about them or the career they're going to have. It's so easy to waste your money on this stuff if you go authentic. Every year I contact "My man in China" via email and get his latest URL. he moves all the time and gets busted every now and then. He's back up in days at a new site and his jerseys are around $30 for a beautiful copy with all sewn letters/numbers. He has new players available within weeks (sometimes even days) of their coming to a team. I buy about 4-5 jerseys a year this way and when a player gets traded, or cut I don't get burned like I did before. What always amazes me is how good the fakes are. A really bad screen-printed pretend jersey at Academy is over $60 and I can get a great looking fake on-field jersey for $30. Who in the hell is guying the screen-printed crap? Every time they shut him down he pops back up. That's the new economic reality IP holders. Time to get your prices back to reality. If Keki in China can afford to crank out hundreds of thousands of jerseys like this and ship them in small packages all over the US then it's hard to miss that the NFL is fucking over it's fans with overpriced crap.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
How, exactly, do people purchasing a good cost the world economy anything?
In a variety of ways depending on the nature of the counterfeit good. Some problems with counterfeits are more serious than others.
1) Many counterfeit goods are produced by criminal (think Mafia, etc) organizations. Purchasing these goods subsidizes these organizations.
2) Counterfeit goods weaken incentives to produce innovative and/or higher quality goods
3) Many counterfeit goods are not produced to appropriate safety standards and constitute a health/safety hazard.
4) Counterfeits undermine the relationship between customer and buyer as the buyer can no longer be sure of the product they are receiving
5) Counterfeits damage brand reputations and value (and yes these are important)
6) Counterfeits weaken incentives to conduct research and development. No point in paying for research if everyone else doesn't have to.
7) Many counterfeit goods are not produced to appropriate performance and quality standards. Some are outright frauds such as placebo pills.
Or it may well be that the quality control on the counterfeit merchandise is HIGHER than the QC for the official NFL. Just because the counterfeit is cheaper in price doesn't mean it is lower in quality. 90% of the price of the merchandise is the logo.
Two problems with that. First is that if you haven't addressed the free rider problem. There are lots of costs besides simply the cost of manufacturing the good. Advertising, distribution, brand building, R&D, marketing, etc. These are very significant and the counterfeiters do not have to pay them but still reap the benefits of them. That is a HUGE problem and is 100% of the reason we have patents and copyright.
The second is that the reason the logo has value is because of the relationship between the customer and the seller. Counterfeit goods often damage that relationship. If I buy something I want to be sure it is exactly what I thought it was. I want to be sure of who made it, where they made it, how they made it and what they will do to stand behind it. Sometimes those things are important to me and if I cannot be sure of those things then the person selling them is committing a fraud. Maybe sometimes we are ok with knowing that something is a knockoff but most of the time there is a lot more to be lost by condoning counterfeit goods than there is by allowing them.
Think of it this way. If someone who looked kind of similar to you (maybe eerily similar) showed up at your place of work tomorrow and started working your job and collecting your paycheck despite never having had to pay for your education, would you be ok with that? Same situation here. Someone has invested a lot of time and money and resources into developing and making that product and then someone else simply copies their work without having to do the hard and expensive bits and claims it as their own. If you cannot figure out why that is a bad thing then I'm not sure you'll ever understand economics.
A rich person pays more taxes in dollar amount than a middle-class person, sure, but in proportion to income the middle-class person is likely going to pay more. Whether corporations should pay income taxes is another discussion (they should and do pay property taxes).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The Republican Party is also a non-profit, as is the Democratic Party.
Being a non-profit doesn't make one charitable.
Learn to love Alaska
The taxes in the USA are regressive. As a top 10% wage earner, I paid about 10% in federal income tax, less than 20% total tax (including all federal, state, and local taxes). And the wealthy (the 1% people talk about) often pay much less than that, some even getting tax rebates. And most of the value of taxes goes to the rich.
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