This month’s fake Jeans, Nikes, Bonds, Apparel, Cocaine, Money, Meds, Gold, Perfume, Condoms, Beach Stickers, Art, Death, Tickets, DVDs, Blackberry batteries, Vodka, Pesticides, Circuit Breakers, UGGs, Wines, Tourniquets, iPads, Games, Cigarettes, iPod, Phones and Toilet Paper.
Meanwhile:
Fake goods are fine, says EU study
A new European Union-funded report has declared that buying designer goods can benefit consumers and the companies whose brands are being ripped off.
The study, co-written by a Home Office adviser, says consumers benefit from the market for knock-off designer clothes at knock-down prices.
It also rejects the complaints of designer companies, claiming that losses to the industry as a result of counterfeiting are vastly exaggerated – because most of those who buy fakes would never pay for the real thing – and finding that the rip-off goods can actually promote their brands.
The report adds that the police should not waste their time trying to stop the bootleggers.
It disputes claims that the counterfeiting of luxury brands is funding terrorism and organised crime and argues there is little public appetite for tough law enforcement measures as consumers enjoy the bargains offered by the illegal trade, which has been estimated to be worth £1.3 billion in the UK.
Professor David Wall, who co-authored the report and advises the government on crime, said the real cost to the industry from counterfeiting could be one-fifth of previously calculated figures.
“It’s probably even less,” he said. “There is also evidence that it actually helps the brands, by quickening the fashion cycle and raising brand awareness.”
He added: “We should be focusing on the trade in counterfeit drugs, dodgy aircraft parts and other stuff that really causes public harm.
“At a time when there is no more public resources for police, and they are being asked to do more, law enforcement should be focusing on other things.”
Previously:
Dutch research institution says piracy good for economy, not responsible for music industry’s problems
Reading advice:
Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands
Virginia W. Lunsford
ebook ISBN: 9781403979384
Print ISBNs: 9781403966926 HB
This exciting scholarly work examines Dutch maritime violence in the seventeenth century. The young Dutch Republic enjoyed a cultural and economic preeminence, and many of its seamen also took up pillaging, terrorizing their victims on the high seas and on European waterways. A story almost entirely untold until now, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands presents new data and understandings of early modern piracy generally, and also sheds important new light on Dutch and European history as well, such as the history of national identity and state formation, and the history of crime and criminality.
http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9781403979384
