Faking a Company

gambit3 writes "What happens when pirating a movie, an application, or a game is not enough for you? Well, you take the next step and pirate a whole company. It happened to Japanese electronics giant NEC. Counterfeiters had set up what amounted to a parallel NEC brand with links to a network of more than 50 electronics factories in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan."

Re:This happens all the time...

[GaryPatterson]

No... this kind of thing almost never happens.

Usually fakers just do what you said - use the name. They don't set up an entire outsourced manufacturing base with a global distribution arm reaching as far as Africa and the EU.

Re:not "faking a company"

[Tx]

Did they pretend to be NEC in wholesale deals with other businessmen and the other businessmen did not they were dealing with them? I did not find it in TA.

Only because you didn't READ IT.

These records showed that the counterfeiters carried NEC business cards, commissioned product research and development in the company's name and signed production and supply orders.

Some of the factories that were raided had erected bogus NEC signs and shipped their products packaged in authentic looking boxes and display cases.

etc, etc

Re:Why target NEC?

[petermgreen]

i'd guess because NEC is a well known brand without having so many existing deals with retailers/distributors that it would be difficult to set up such deals for the clone company

Reformatting the text is possible

[tepples]

To get a slightly more traditional web format on IHT articles, look for "ARTICLE TOOLS" on the left and click "CHANGE FORMAT".

Re:This happens all the time...

[swillden]

The FA actually implied that some of the products being sold were knock-offs of legitimate NEC products. So can we quit the "There's no piracy here" meme? Copyright infringement...

Copyright law doesn't generally apply to products. At most it may apply to artistic, non-functional aspects of the exterior design, but even that's rare. Note the number of iPod knock-offs that look just like an iPod, except they have to use a different input mechanism because the iPod wheel controller is patented. And they don't say "Apple" or "iPod" on them anywhere.

Unless there are patented components, it's generally perfectly legal to produce and sell knock-offs of a company's products. It's not legal to put the company's name on them, that's trademark infringement.

Faking slashdot

[rayver]

Speaking of which, there's also a Chinese group trying to fake slashdot: http://www.slashdot.cn [slashdot.cn] which redirects to: http://solidot.org/ [solidot.org]