Yet another study says counterfeit products aren’t really a problem.

At first, there was already proven that counterfeit products aren’t a problem for the manufacturers because most consumers who buy counterfeit goods weren’t being tricked. And due to that fact,  the counterfeit products work as good advertising. And on top of that they have proven that almost 50% of those consumers bought the real thing within two and a half years.

A new research by David Wall, has again proven that the counterfeit products aren’t really a big problem, and that the manufacturers are overrating their losses.  And surprisingly he points out that law enforcement should not waste their time trying to stop the bootleggers.

Be careful because this study focuses on designer goods, so you can’t take in fake pharmaceuticals or fake airplane parts. The actual “harm” depends on what good you are talking about, so it’s very dangerous to talk about “counterfeit products” in general.

And finally he points out that the real problem is that they lump all the things into one category and due to that the law enforcement spends less time focusing on the things that create a real harm.

Martijn

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100829/21095710809.shtml

Australia: Tokidoki takes firm action against sellers of counterfeit products

Tokidoki is an international fashion lifestyle company who makes individual design qualities. When they were alerted in January 2010 that there are counterfeit products going around labeled as Tokidoki they issued proceedings against the two importers of the shipment of fake Tokidoki products.

This case has been settled and Tokidoki is receiving a big amount of money for the costs and damages to their company.

This has not been the first time they took action against sellers and manufacturers of counterfeit products, because for them it’s important to protect their original designs. And with this settelement they hope they can show a signal to all those who dare to counterfeit their products.

Martijn

http://www.mondaq.com/australia/article.asp?articleid=114998

Counterfeiters hurt global trade

At first they give you an example of how you can hurt not your own business but how you can put the whole economy at risk by agreeing in buying and selling counterfeit products.

They point out that when you deal with dubious manufacturers that you are contributing in weakening the supply chain. Because more income is flowing into their operations and not into the legitimate factories.
Do not forget that you also put your own reputation at risk when you deal with counterfeiters and in some cases you can also be held liable.

Martijn

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Counterfeit-Products-Hurt-International-Trade&id=4925636

How to have an acadamic certificate in one click.

Why would you study at an universtity if you just can buy your degree on the internet? A recent study shows that this isn't so odd. An ivestigation shows that almost a quarter of 1000 Curricula Vitae were fake. Applicants buy a degree with the wanted qualifications or are just inventing new qualifications.

Although we are living in a world dominated by the internet , employers give great value to the paper documents, which can be fake. This is causing important problems which have to be dealth with. Companies can go bankrupt because the person who is managing over its finances doesn't have the right knowledge to manage it. Also the society is in danger, a wrong medical diagnosis can be fatal or the safty of employees is in danger.

Those who sell fake academic certificates escape from prosecution by saying on their site that the certificates are fake. But the blame has to be put on employers. They can easily check if the certificate is genuine, but most don't...

Mathieu De Meulemeester

http://www.nicourses.com/education_articles/fake_degree_certificates.html

Medecines supposed to be good for our health!

In Europe,  the black market for counterfeit medecines has exploded in last few years. They menace our health and stopping the trade in counterfeit medecines has become a substantial case to protect European citizens. Counterfeit medecins are an infraction on intellectual property and te ingredients could be wrongly dosed. The most important source of counterfeit medecines would be the internet, after all you're just one click away from purshasing counterfeit medecines.

The European Commission is collaborating with the European Medicines Agency and other international organizations to stop the trading in counterfeit products. The major goals are to have a better view on the black market, to define the real medecines much better and to develop methods to detect and to check legal medecines. All these suggestions were grouped together and is known as the "pharma package".

It's clear that a lot has to be done. But it is postive that the problem has been noticed by Europe, our health is after all always our number one concern.

Mathieu De Meulemeester

http://www.ehfcn.org/newsletter/2010/q2-2/articles/nr/373

Counterfeit pharmaceuticals

The number of counterfeit f pharmaceuticals that are produced rise especially in China, India and Russia. The counterfeit activities cause damage to pharmaceutical manufacturers’ reputations and after years of research a part of the potential profits of legitimate pharmaceutical manufacturers disappears because of the sales of the counterfeit products. Counterfeit activities happens most in countries where anti-counterfeiting laws are weak and where they do not dispose of resources to identify the criminal activity. The World health organization estimates for countries with emerging economies, that about 25% of total pharmaceuticals sales are counterfeit. But It’s not easy to predict. If they look to the number of incidents that were detected they determine an increase from 200 in 2002  to 2000 in 2009.

 In my opinion counterfeit pharmaceuticals are very dangereous for the health of the people in a society. Because almost all the people trust the pharmaceuticals that they swallow for it’s difficult to see the difference between the real and the fake pharmaceutical.

Kristof Buffel

http://www.pharmacomplianceblog.com/blog/?p=3008

Top selling counterfeit products

I think it’s very interesting to know which kind of products are frequently counterfeit. Counterfeiting  happens very frequently with Cucci Handbags, MP3 players, jeans, electrical cords, sneakers, sunglasses,… A lot of people buy the counterfeit products, although it’s very easy to recognize when it’s a fake product. You can notice for instance that some labels are missing, the printing is unclear, the handbag has loose threads, … The reason why nevertheless so many people buy the counterfeit products is of course because the price they have to pay is so much lower than the price of the real product.

They also have investigated how and where the counterfeit products were sold to the people and where all these products were produced.  Scott Wolfson, a spokesman for the consumer Product Safety Commission, assumed that it was exceptional for counterfeit product to be sold in well-known walk-in stores,  but rather vendors who are peddling counterfeit products on the city streets. Most of the counterfeit products in the U.S. came from China.

Kristof Buffel

http://hubpages.com/hub/Top-Selling-Counterfeit-Products

Taiwan to clamp down on Chinese counterfeit products bearing Taiwanese labels

China is well-known as the mainland for counterfeit products, also Taiwan suffers by these Chinese counterfeit products because these products often bear a label with ‘Made in Taiwan’. The Vice Minister of Economic Affairs of Taiwan said that they have formed a special research team to crackdown on commercial piracy. The government of Taiwan will try to provide each local product with the ‘MIT’ quality mark. Hopefully it’s a good solution to solve the problem, because the economy is very important for Taiwan, well-known in the entirely world as one of the best producers of computer and television screens.

I think that it will be difficult to stop China from making counterfeit products, but providing products with a quality mark is a beginning. Unfortunately it’s a disadvantage for the economy of other countries and it entails political tensions between China and the other countries, for instance Taiwan where there are already political tensions because China does not accept Taiwan’s independence stance.

Kristof Buffel

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/36138/

WHO launches taskforce to fight counterfeit drugs

The most dangerous counterfeit products are counterfeit medical products, such as counterfeit drugs and vaccines.  In 2006, the WHO started a taskforce to fight against the illegal trade of counterfeit medical products because every year thousands of people die due to the use of these products. They want to help people become more familiar with the growing market of counterfeit medicines and the health risks they cause. The taskforce tries to help governments to stop the corruption in the sections of the police charged with the fight against counterfeit medicines. They also ask the drug manufactures to make their products more complicated. It seems that now counterfeit drugs are really easy to fake. In developing countries, one in four packets of medicine you buy in street markets could be fake. When you look at some countries in Africa, the drugs are sold between the fruit and the vegetables on the large open-air markets. There, the major problem is that they just don’t have another place to buy these products for the price they can afford.

(http://www.scielosp.org/scielo.php?pid=S0042-96862006000900005&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en)

Ivo De Clercq

MSU spearheads research to prevent counterfeit products

In the US there is set up a team, consisting of various researchers from departments at MSU (Michigan State University) or other colleges, who has as aim to combat counterfeit products. They work also together  with officials from technology and automobile parts manufactures and the FBI to attempt a reduction of counterfeiting. That’s why their program calls A-CAPPP that stands for Anti-counterfeiting and product protection.

Wilson, an associate professor of criminal justice and A-Cappp’s director, sees how important the problem is because counterfeiting has a huge social and economical impact. He estimates the worldwide market for counterfeit products at a rough $600 billion and emphasizes the danger of counterfeit pharmaceuticals.  But how can they protect the public from all those counterfeit products?

At first the team will search as much as possible information about the counterfeit products in the U.S ,which they will collect in a database and then  try to indentify criminal patterns.  Another and more practical way to combat counterfeit products is through  the use of biosensors implanted into the products that prove their legitimacy. Hopefully the team will find some good solutions to combat counterfeit products…

Kristof Buffel


http://www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2010/02/msu_spearheads_research_to_prevent_counterfeit_products

Google making millions from advertising counterfeit goods

On the Google website, the biggest search engine in the World, you have the possibility to advertise your products somewhere on the website. A company wanting to do so has to pay a price to Google every time someone clicks on the advertisement. Now the problem is that apparently Google advertises websites that are selling counterfeit products. The websites are, most of the time, not legitimate which I would not expect from the ‘trusted platform’ Google. When such a website pays €4 to Google every time someone clicks on the advertisement, Google is making millions in an illegal way. According to a spokesman from Google, they have strict terms and conditions to allow adverts. If they discover an advert referring to counterfeit goods, they take it down immediately. I think that Google allows websites between legal and illegal just to make some more profits. Police’s e-crime units already closed down thousands of these websites but in an hour, they just reappear.

(http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6981227.ece)

Ivo De Clercq

Fake and counterfeit goods promote unethical behaviour

When you wear a fake Ray-Ban sunglasses or a replica Gucci handbag, you want to show yourself wealthier than you actually are. Beside this richer lifestyle, a study of the University of North Carolina has shown that these kinds of counterfeit products can lead people to unethical behaviour. They cheat when they fill in a test and behave dishonestly, but they have no idea of this impact coming from these counterfeit products. For the experiments, some people were told that they were going to wear a fake pair of designer sunglasses but in fact the sunglasses were real. The experiments showed for example that such a person cheated on a test to gain more money. Furthermore the actions of others are interpreted by people wearing fake goods as dishonestly or unethically all the time. Francesca Gino, who did the experiments, said that buyers of counterfeit products for themselves actually pay a price for the morality of the rest of their life.

(http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/04/09/fake-and-counterfeit-goods-promote-unethical-behaviour/)

Ivo De Clercq

technogy and counterfeit products

Where ever you go in the world , you will always find a counterfeit product. Even when you are at home , you can bump into counterfeit products by surfing on the world-wide web. The business in counterfeit products is enormous and the most of these products are damaging for a lot of people and firms. Can this business be stopped in a way?

Yes and no. Some enterprises who produces goods which are technological stunts,such as Microsoft, can fight counterfeit products with technology such. Other companies that are producing luxery goods such as handbags must find another way to fight counterfeit products. Microsoft can prove the authentication of its products by checking if it's real or fake. The persons who downloaded the fake version will then receive a warning from Microsoft. Microsoft also fights cloning, this is coping information so that their software would look real, by installing firewalls. Technology can also be used for the recognition of real medecins by scanning barcodes that are attached to the medecins.

However, technolgy evolves... on both sides. Companies will be forced to keep developping new technologies to be one step ahead of those who develop counterfeit products. It's a never-ending battle.

Mathieu De Meulemeester

http://www.spotcounterfeits.co.uk/technology-can-beat-counterfeiting.html

counterfeit products... a good deal?

Many companies are frustrated by counterfeit products because they would be the cause for many losses in profit. But a recent study about counterfeit products says it doens't have to be all negative. Counterfeit products can help the real products in a certain way.

The study found out that a part of the consumers who bought counterfeit products ,they bought the real products in two and a half year. Counterfeit products would create a lower treshold or entry point for consumers to buy a certain product. In additon , it's good advertising. Counterfeit products make consumers to know the real products. This would mean that the many claims for the damage handed in by the companies are exaggerated.

Altough there has to be made an important difference between the sort of goods. Counterfeit products aren't that positive when we are talking about pharmaceuticals and for example plane parts. The kind of damage that counterfeit products can damage to the real products is depended off the industry sector you are talking about.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100829/21095710809.shtml

Mathieu De Meulemeester

Overseas Factories & Counterfeit Goods

At the World market there are a lot of very expensive designer products. However, due to the biggest factory in the world, China, the whole world is changing. You can still find the expensive products but at the shop around the corner you can find the same products for a little price. An increasing number of counterfeit products are the main reason for the crowding out of the original goods. These fake products with minimal quality control and cheaper materials are dominating the market. Branded goods, cosmetics, medicines, batteries, pirated films, you can find counterfeit products everywhere. In some cases they even can be dangerous or bad for your health, like in the case of fake medicines or counterfeit shampoo. The Chinese government takes measures to stop the counterfeiting business but if they really did so, a lot of people would lose their jobs. It looks like the only action that is going to work is when people stop asking for these counterfeit products.

(http://ezinearticles.com/?Overseas-Factories-and-Counterfeit-Goods&id=4891282)

Ivo De Clercq