Knockoff Tech Selling Better Than the Original 321
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."
In the west too! (Score:2)
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Maybe it is different in countries (like China) where piracy is so prevalent, that the pirates actually have competition in the form of other pirates, with the end result being higher quality knock offs.
that depends on what is bootleged.... automobiles? (Score:2)
when you get into the world of pirated automobiles..... um. i don't even know what to think about that. makes you wonder how they can be competitive. that's obviously a massive operation employing a ton of people.
i feel like i need to look into what
Re:that depends on what is bootleged.... automobil (Score:3, Interesting)
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China is simply undergoing the same process as the USA did 120-130 years ago. The only difference is that American "businessmen" at the time were faking European brand goods while Chinese are now faking Japanese and American.
Nothing surprising here. Once their own brands appear in quantity they will suddenly bec
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Beer is a bad example. Brewing is a trade, and trademarks do not protect beer styles. It's a recipe. There are restrictions on what you can call your beer.
Many of the American brewers who "knocked off" European styles were actually immigrants themselves. Adolphus Busch (who we have to blame for Budweiser) himsel
How about iPods? Chinese iPods! (Score:3, Interesting)
It was the same size and shape and weight as a nano, but made with obviously cheaper materials. The clickwheel was replaced with a similar-looking clunky clicker. The front, normally logoless, was blazoned with a tacky ripoff Apple logo and the word "iPod" in cheap decal. The color screen was about double the size though.
BUT: The software was cooler. The UI design was all-new, and much flashier than Apple's, and ran in many lang
What did Samsung do next? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What did Samsung do next? (Score:5, Funny)
Customers pay. Nobody gets hurt, and life goes on.
Only if we could do that here... (being Belgium, that is)
MadCow.
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Even Donald Trump agrees that the Chinese gov't is playing dirty:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/10/9/23075 5.shtml?s=icp [newsmax.com]
Why we continue to give away jobs to a big communist cheater and run up a big bubble-risky trade deficit with them, I'll never know.
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That's a legitimate question, and the answer is pretty simple: because the US standard of living and low inflation rate depend on cheap Chinese imports, as well as a commitment to free trade. Furthermore, China owns significant parts of the US (how do you think the trade deficit is paid for?).
That's why voters keep voting for parties that promise to keep the current trade poli
I'll tell you why. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's all about the pricing and availability of goods. Go do an inventory of your house, or even just your bedroom, and find how many of your things are imported.
And now that lower-skilled jobs are being exported over there, fewer Americans can fit the "union tax" into their budgets, assuming the US goods meet the same quality.
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Whenever anyone in the West starts making a big deal about their human rights abuses, trade policies, rampant piracy or whatever, Beijing trots out that little whiskey-swilling porno addict from North Korea to show us that we need China's cooperation on the world stage. What, you thought that Kim Jong-il was doing this on his own? Please. That clown couldn't find his ass with both hands.
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Thats the way the world turns.
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Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
With Samsung, it's not that hard to imagine
Re:What did Samsung do next? (Score:5, Funny)
Jet Li as a disgruntled Chinese engineer who must help his corrupt evil employer pirate Korean cell phones to feed his family, and Jackie Chan as the bumbling Korean businessman who must bring him to justice! Who will win in this contest of wills! Can Li retain his honor after making pink cell phones for teenage girls! Find out in - Death Factory of Cell Phones: The Legend of The Ringtone Dragon Coming soon!
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Two years military service doesn't teach you to be an assassin who can kill and leave no trace. It teaches you to run around like a bitch and do pressups like a bitch, but not much else.
There are very few organisations in the world which can kill someone and leave no trace, and Samsung ain't one of them.
This is "Capitalism" at its best. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. (Score:4, Interesting)
The manufacturers of the "genuine" products will need to compete based on price.
But if you really believe that, would you find anything wrong with me selling a bulk spammer with the "Red Hat" name on it?
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Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. (Score:5, Insightful)
While you can debate whether IP is an absolute right, human rights violation, or somewhere in between. Your statement that innovation will not happen without "value in IP" is verifiably false. Just look at the vast majority of human history.
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Care to give an example? It certainly doesn't make any sense to me why somebody would spend time and money inventing something, just so that other people can profit off of it.
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You have to understand, that academia, while great with pure sciences, isn't about applying that science to create a new thing.
Sure, there are going to be anomolies of people creating things out of pure altruism, but those are just outliers. Most human beings want to be compensated in som
Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. (Score:4, Insightful)
Also known as a strawman argument.
Sure there is. Without innovation a company has no advantage over its competitors. To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.
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Okay, so I find that my Super Duper Gizmo is duplicated and sold very cheaply by a company that didn't have to expend any money on research and development. I can no longer sell my original Gizmo, because someone has undercut me.
So I head back to the drawing board. I work with my customers, I do some market research, I find out what everyone wants and/or will want, I hi
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Is this the question and the answer? You innovate because when your product becomes stale no one wants it.
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Is this the question and the answer? You innovate because when your product becomes stale no one wants it.
Problem is, that doesnt work - sure, the product is stale, but if you invest money improving it, theres someone out there that can take that improvement and produce it for less than you can because they have no investment to recoup. Now theres two products on the market that arent stale, except one is higher priced than the other, so guess which one consumers are buying...
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At which point you improve it again! Taking someone else's idea and building a manufacturing plant to produce a similar product takes time. Building a plant to produce a
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I think it takes much much more time than you think. You seem to be presuming that there are companies out there that copy everyone else's products. However, most products fail miserably. They only copy the successful ones. So, define successful. Then, get people to fund the copying of successful. After all that, then the minor time to retool that you claim to be the only time necessary to copy something. The total ti
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You're conveniently leaving off the important part of the logic in his argument. Sure, innovation is important to compete. That's what makes or breaks most companies. But if a company is going to innovate, only to see their competition copy their products, but without spending one red c
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I just double-checked, and I don't see any logic in his argument. In fact, I don't really see much of an argument at all.
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That's the whole point of this article. Virtually nothing is hard to copy, any more. Hell, cell phones? That's not a simple device, by any means, but it's being done. I get emails from China on a daily basis offering to manufacture short runs of just about any product I can imagine, and all it takes is an email.
So believe that without copyright law
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Umm, OK, I'll give you a bunch of plastic and silicon, and my cell phone, and you give me a replica of it. You must have a seriously different definition of "hard to copy" than I do.
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Sure there is. Without innovation a company has no advantage over its competitors. To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.
Theres also the third requirement - innovation to move the market forward.
Whats the market going to look like when the market innovator has no recourse on those undercutting them and they cant afford to lower the prices, eat the R&D costs and fight them on that front? Whats it going to look like when they decide to leave the market? Are you seriously under the impression that the copiers are suddenly going to grow a backbone and magic their own top class R&D department out of thin air? You thi
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It doesn't seem to me that the market will look any different. What did the video cassette industry look like after Betamax failed? What happened to PCs after IBM left? How is UNIX doing now that Bell Labs isn't involved in it? What would chic
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I'm sure you already know this, but the reason we have IP (in capitalist countries) is to encourage innovation. The less (good) IP is respected, the less incentive there is to innovate. Of course here on slashdot we know that not all IP encourages innovation, but this is a pretty egregious example of where lack of IP is going to hurt innovation and that'
To compete on price you need R&D (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
apples and oranges (Score:2)
The latest "brand name designs" rarely if ever contain any innovation beyond taking advantage of the latest smaller battery or whatever; what companies are trying to recoup there is not R&D, but advertising.
Re:To compete on price you need R&D (Score:3, Funny)
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And how do you compete based on price with a company that does not have any R&D costs?
Downsizing on R&D will not be enough, as their R&D is (practically) zero.
Ah, I see! You propose that the whole world must stop innovating, because it clearly does not pay!
I'd say: let the Chinese do within their borders what they like, but sue every bastard that imports these counterfeit goods.
Overpaid Westerners (Score:2)
In reality the hand-work, the manufacturing and support is much more important. The brainwork is absurdly overpaid. The West would be well advised to rebuild their factories and discard their media/celebrity obsessed culture
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"Outright theft" tends to comprise theft rather than non-theft. Of course, this piracy indirectly deprives others of resources, but then again, so does capitalism.
So, this is capitalism, and it is indirect theft.
Don't manufacturer in China (Score:3, Insightful)
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Then you realize a lot of the digital camera brands have the same Sanyo(or is it Samsung) guts in them.
This is just an assumption... (Score:5, Insightful)
... but if the knockoff alternatives lack the DRM that the authentic products contain, I'd probably consider purchasing the knockoff as well.
Why China? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Meanwhile, the government does whatever they think will best benefit the Chinese nation as a whole. If that means pirating products, so be it. Th
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What "worked" with Russia was a dangerous game of military/industrial brinkmanship that should never be repeated again.
-Grym
labor costs? (Score:2)
Obviously India *had* a large pool of well educated workers that could be paid less than the USA. if you look at a map, it seems that shipping from India adds some twists and turns that China does not. i don'
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2c
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... the lessons of history (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I don't see why you and the author are making the assumption that China will eventually change its ways. The lack of effective copyright enforcement in China has created a different, yet fully f
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So does this mean that we can consider China as a (Score:2)
I mean if they can duplicate it then they should be able to take a prototype and put it into mass production for cost less then anywhere else.
And since China is supposed to be a socialistic society then that means their society gets a big discount.
right?
Its the industrial age in china and lets fact it, they have more people then when we went thru that age.
Dupe! (Score:5, Funny)
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Self-Interest in China... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Piracy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Trajectory (Score:2)
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?
There's a habit of examining past trends and then extrapolating them into the future like a trajectory. If they're catching up with us that fast then what happens when they've caught up, we'll be doomed. No. When they've caught up, they'll be in exactly the same situation we are, having to do lots of expensive research, development for the smallest advance.
What'll become of the west? We'll become equal trading partners, no more, no less. We'll have to work hard to compete, that's all.
What goes around.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Deja vu? (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=208390&cid=16
China discovers generics... (Score:2, Funny)
editing skills (Score:3, Funny)
"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.
So go make a good product at a reasonable price (Score:3, Interesting)
Because let's face reality. All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated. Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from. Samsung contracts phones to the same lines that copy them. The only difference being that the brand name charges more.
Will brands disappear? (Score:3, Interesting)
All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated.
Very good point. Ultimately, brands are the creation of marketing more than anything else. Marketing until now has been based primarily on the notion that you must bombard customers with awareness of your brand in order to get them to buy your products. Otherwise, how will they know the difference between your product and that of your competitor?
However, brands
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many times it is the case, but just ask motorola about the H700 bluetooth headsets and the problems with counterfits.
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You willing to stake your life on that? Instead of buying those pricey Bridgestone tires for your car that your wife and kids use
why is this illiegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
As most of us know, the rules of patents and copyrights are there to allow an innovator to recoup expenses and some profit. We have taken it to the point where the rules are now used to insure financial security for the entire corporation into perpetuity. It seems like now that manufacture is so cheap, and the design process is so streamlined, that the big shops should be able to get a products refreshed pretty frequently. The big reason that large firms cannot is the sheer amount of overhead these mammoth corporations carry. Many will complain, like the car companies, that things like health care adds 5-10% to every car. But how much does overhead like luxury building, private airplanes, and golden parachutes add?
Perhaps if money was put into hiring and training people, and encouraging innovation, we would have nothing to fear from the knockoff artist.
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Where did you get your morals? Church? You seriously see nothing wrong with letting somebody else do all of the hard work inventing something, and you just copying it? That's one of the most morally bankrupt statement I've read in a long time. When was the last time YOU invented something useful and let somebody else profit off of it? (I'm guessing never)
Luddite legacy IPR good for some bad for US (Score:2)
Luddite legacy (industrial-age) IPR is a failure and exceptionally harmful to US, EU
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Today, mostly the only thing of value is the research or knowledge behind the product. If you can bypass that and steal the design or knowledge or process then you can make the product in parallel with the original designer. Of course, since it cost nothing to develop the design or process then
It is the companies own fault (Score:2)
I Told You So (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [vwh.net] 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 [slashdot.org] 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
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So, do you have any ideas on how one "prepares" for this? Do we hope that we elect wise leaders that just take over the idea of funding R&D in
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If the question you're asking is, "How do we rearrange the pieces on the chessboard?" the answer is, "You don't, because you need to start learning to play Go."
It will be a different game. You won't be competing for artifacts or reso
So my TV is not legit? (Score:4, Funny)
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Fakes? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Car example (Score:2)
China found out about the impending release of the chevrolet spark, a company called Chery cloned it into the Chevy QQ. It outsells the spark 5 to 1.
Chevrolet is not amused, in fact is has a lawsuit against Chery because they copied their design (the car is pretty similar) and beat them to market too.
China will always copy (Score:3, Insightful)
No it won't.
Truth is, we are gonna get exactly what we have comming to us if we don't pull our head out
Re:Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
But they didn't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
And honestly, I rather prefer the imitation.
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There is no difference between a pirated microsoft product and the original. Unlike hardware companies like samsung, Microsoft would basically just be competing with themselves, which is why they now have the genuine advantage program and other protections.
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You had it right except the "better" part. There is an old saying. "Good artists copy, great artists steal." MSFT copies Apple and does a shitty job of it like these knock off artists in China. Apple sometimes steals ideas from linux and even MSFT but recreate them in a way that look better than the original. That is the difference between good and great artists.
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"Better" modified "selling", not "product".
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I guess that depends on what your definition of "better" is.
Re:Who would thought... (Score:5, Funny)
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Duh...it's a poem:
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.
It's profound, don't you think?