Pirated goods a $650-billion industry

[CBC News]

Pirated consumer goods and knock-offs are estimated to be a $650 billion a year industry, encompassing everything from luxury apparel and high-tech electronics to faux pharmaceuticals, tainted pet food and kids toys, like the Thomas & Friends railway toys that were coated with lead paint.
According to the World Customs Organization, Europe's top clothing and footwear companies lose $10 billion US each year to brand name copycats. The problem is particularly troublesome in the high fashion centres such as Paris, New York and Milan. In fact as much as 20 per cent of the clothes bought in Italy are fakes, with organized crime responsible for the majority of the knock-offs, according to a report issued by the Italian consumers association in April 2004.
Full story
"Why would someone knowlingly buy counterfeit goods?"


More...

 

[#juan]

At least half of Wal-mart's business is crappy, made in China, knock-offs.

 

[Pangloss]

$650 billion a year? By whose measure? By what measure? The manufacturers themselves? Who says copyright is such a great thing in all cases anyway?

Skeptical alarms go off with self-serving stories like these.

Pangloss

 

[Nuggler]

knock-offs

One which comes to mind right away are the cheap fishing lure knock-offs sold by Wallymart. And, the reallllllllllly cheap fishing lure knock-offs sold by the "dollar" stores.

The first try and resemble Rapalas et al, at about 1/2 their price. Some of them ain't too bad, actually. The latter resemble the lure from hell, and if I had a kid I didn't want to fish, I'd buy these for him/her.

650 billion is a bit of a reach, probably.

Who gives a sh!t. None of em are made in Canada/USA anymore. Doesn't affect our employment levels.

Someone will jump in and explain how I don't understand macroeconomics............Correct, I don't.

Closed factories are infinitely more understandable. :-|

:canadascrew Harper)

 

[MikeyDB]

Hey N'ugg hows it goin...

Don't worry about knock-offs friend, read the "Lets fuq the elderly thread" for a glimpse of sound reasoning from the movers and shakers of today's modern society...

The most stressful condition in all of life is being held accountable for something over which you have no control. The consumer society demands enough to pay their bus fare and screw the elderly but want everything as cheap as it can possibly be obtained. That includes spending money on a different color of socks or a different T shirt so they can express their individuality and their "uniqueness" in the universe....

If that happens to mean that men women and children are starved somewhere else in the world...prefferably somewhere where they won't have to be seen by the consumer...so much the better.

Our modern strain of young turk...knows that it's a means of demonstrating your prowess at shopping when you can "get a deal" that your neighbor missed out on...so if you can make a three dollar watch look like a $2000.00 watch...people will be more than pleased and flock to your establishment to purchase the phoney...

As long as some designers name or some special symbol is silk-screened onto your blue jeans you can fool the world (as though the world cares what you wear) that you're a dynamo of wealth and power and they won't know or care for that matter that you didn't pay a hundred bucks for that pair of denims....

What's more disturbing about knock-offs and the popularity of The Gap and Old Navy and Walmart and the Dollar store....is what it says about the individual.

It makes a huge difference that you drive up to the dollar store in a Lexus or a BMW...everyone understands that you're likely to be "seen" driving your car but once inside...hey you're the same as everyone else!

Why should anyone care that Sam Walton or anyone for that matter has found the key to billions of dollars in income by feeding the greed and appetites of people who really don't give a damn about a bunch of picaninnies living far off somewhere in a dirt bowl.....

The "knock-off" industry is simply following the trends in human evolution...

We only have "knock-off" sentient beings these days....not real human beings......

 

[Twila]

n/m...

 

[tay]

Recent raids by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department turned up more than 400 buckets of apparently counterfeit laundry detergents at multiple locations in the Los Angeles area.

According to authorities, the fake detergent is available for sale at swap meets, fundraisers and online.
Investigators say that dealers allegedly buy the phony detergent for about $5 and then sell it for sometimes as much as five times the purchase price.

Counterfeiting overall is a nearly $500 billion a year business. This past year alone, Procter & Gamble has helped to identify close to 50 factories that are sending out counterfeit goods. The company which makes Tide, Downy and Gain detergents wants counterfeit products off the streets, and it has urged the U.S. Senate to pass relevant legislation. It has also provided tips to local law enforcement about possible counterfeit product.

Procter & Gamble spokeswoman Anne Candido says the sale of counterfeit laundry detergent has been on the rise. “We started seeing this really escalate starting about a year ago,” she said. “It’s showing up all over the place and the social media is the enabler.”

Lt. Geoffrey Deedrick of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Office of Counterfeit and Piracy Team says one possible factor contributing to the rise could be that selling counterfeit laundry detergent is a lot less risky than selling other types of contraband.

“These guys are driving around with van loads of this stuff every day like it’s nothing,” Deedrick said. “If you made just as much money selling counterfeit Tide as heroin, what would you choose? The Tide.”

Charges stemming from arrests in the Los Angeles raids are pending, police said.

Once seized, samples from the allegedly counterfeit laundry detergent are sent to a Procter & Gamble lab in Cincinnati, Ohio, for quality testing and to determine if the product is indeed counterfeit.

Jack English, a senior scientist at Procter & Gamble, says that the risks of using counterfeit detergent could be very serious. “Without sounding too scary, the risks are quite large because we just don’t know. It would be like putting your family in a car that you have no idea where it came from.”


And while English found that the seized detergent looked and even smelled like the real stuff, he determined that there was an irregularly high amount of water in the product.


Procter & Gamble says consumers should not buy 5-gallon containers of any product being billed as Procter & Gamble detergent because the company doesn’t sell any detergents in that size. Consumers who have any questions about the detergents are advised to call the phone number on the label of any legitimate Procter & Gamble product.


Authorities Sniffing Out Alleged Fake Laundry Detergent - ABC News

 

[MHz]

Pirated consumer goods and knock-offs are estimated to be a $650 billion a year industry, encompassing everything from luxury apparel and high-tech electronics to faux pharmaceuticals, tainted pet food and kids toys, like the Thomas & Friends railway toys that were coated with lead paint.
According to the World Customs Organization, Europe's top clothing and footwear companies lose $10 billion US each year to brand name copycats. The problem is particularly troublesome in the high fashion centres such as Paris, New York and Milan. In fact as much as 20 per cent of the clothes bought in Italy are fakes, with organized crime responsible for the majority of the knock-offs, according to a report issued by the Italian consumers association in April 2004.
Full story
"Why would someone knowlingly buy counterfeit goods?"


More...

To make their counterfeit lifestyle seem more real. The manufacturer is to bilk more money out of the public for something that is overvalued by a few thousand percent. You have to be a Rothschild to swing deals like that. Was Europe suddenly cold that they needed so many buffalo-skin coats or did they know they were wearing the Indians food supply.
At least we know where we dumped all that lead paint that was left when the new regs came in that curtailed it's use. Leaded gas continued for some years after until it was all used up in case you wonder how much our health and safety really means. Anybody test the paint themselves or was it a big lie to put China in a bad light, sort of like when their CPU chips were discontinued when it was floated that they had a built in back-door, the replacement was Intel chips that were made in Israel so you know damn well that there were a few back-doors built into those chips.
Same with aluminum cookware, as soon as we found out it was putting heavy metal in the brain we quit using them but rather than destroy the rest we sold them in Africa or other 3rd world countries and they were the ones that were getting sick. That is who is behind it and that is also why they hide in the darkness.

 

[Angstrom]

A pirate life for me.

 

[Walter]

At least we know where we dumped all that lead paint that was left when the new regs came in that curtailed it's use. Leaded gas continued for some years after until it was all used up in case you wonder how much our health and safety really means. Anybody test the paint themselves or was it a big lie to put China in a bad light, sort of like when their CPU chips were discontinued when it was floated that they had a built in back-door, the replacement was Intel chips that were made in Israel so you know damn well that there were a few back-doors built into those chips.
Same with aluminum cookware, as soon as we found out it was putting heavy metal in the brain we quit using them but rather than destroy the rest we sold them in Africa or other 3rd world countries and they were the ones that were getting sick. That is who is behind it and that is also why they hide in the darkness.

Piffle and rot.