Lethe wrote:
hmm, the truth he speaks, this young padawan.
Sorry, but this old paddy-wagon feels differently. Read on, McDuff...
Gearhead wrote:
Part of the trouble for western companies is that the Chinese government is doing nothing to stop the copying.
Communist countries do not recognise copyright or trademark infringement as it goes against the ideology. They are making inroads though - they have to if they want to sell items to the Western world - and they do.
However indignant we are of the infringements of someone else's work and rights, we have the luxury of being able to grant people and companies those rights. Any one man's right is another man's restriction. If it was you living near the Guangdong Fender copy shop and having no other means of living than to copy Fenders, what would you do?
Granted, in the same situation, having to feed a family, any of us would do the same - but it isn't the worker who is at fault here. It's the factory owner, who is both exploiting the worker as well as manufacturing an illegal product. All in order to make a fast buck in true capitalist style. By that logic a sweatshop staffed with children is morally acceptable, as it lets them earn money their family needs.
It is far quicker to clone another's product than develop and market them yourself. If no-one bought the clones or if they began to have difficulty exporting without them being seized, the manufacturer wouldn't close the factory down - he'd move on to manufacturing something else that was less hassle - possibly of his own design, and start building his business the old fashioned way. He has the facilities, he has the inexpensive manpower, he just needs to develop a few products and start putting money into marketing them, instead of using it to become rich quickly. Or get a contract building guitars for an established manufacturer - like many of the other Asian factories.
Leo did it himself as well!
What? Copy someone else's design in it's entirety, take a free ride on their marketing dollar and sell his product to fools who think it's the real thing? I think not... He may have taken some ideas from other places, but he always refined and improved them further and furthermore adapted them to modern manufacturing techniques.
One more point - the world has yet to see a Merc copy for a quarter of the price. Meaning if the quality can not be copied, one needs no law for protection.
Why are you assuming the quality is the same? It's not. They are lookalikes which are cobbled together with low quality parts by people who usually have little understanding of what they are building, and no QC. The cheap materials, lack of QC and the fact that they are riding on the coattails of other companies who spend millions of dollars in advertising is what makes their product cheap. Look at Behringer as a less extreme example - are their mixers the same quality as the Mackies they have so blatantly copied? Is the Rolux wristwatch the same quality as the Rolex which it is a clone of? As the western manufacturers have discovered, there are no shortcuts to quality.
On the bright side, the Asian mindset, tradition and work ethic makes it possible for them to produce their own products of a high quality which will eventually compete with the big western boys on their own turf. Japan did it, Korea did it and it's only a matter of time until China does it as well.
