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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

What if you paid and ordered Ralph Lauren and received counterfeit? Because that's the larger problem in my opinion. Especially since it often also includes goods that are dangerous as counterfeit (like medication).

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It raises an important distinction, though: protecting users vs protecting brands. There are business interests pushing to conflate the two, but we shouldn't.

Precisely, in my worldview. Brands have some amount of value for users as they are a stamp of a certain level of manufacturing standard. However that does not mean they are inherently beneficial to consumers.

Yeah exactly. I guess I didn't address the inherent way you GET knockoff shirts/clothing off of ebay which is look for the people who are obviously selling fakes pretending to be reals but for far too cheaply and order accordingly. It's not hard if you aren't totally blind to the standard Engrish language cues. That being said I am probably hurting RL's brand. But do I care? What if selling "official knockoffs" was a thing? What if you paid the smallest of licensing fees to sell an "official knockoff". A certified look alike with no quality standard. That would be a new market segment right?

What if you ordered Ralph Lauren from a guy on the corner selling shirts out of his suitcase?

The argument isn't about counterfeits, the argument is about Amazon's slide from "retail store" to "group of guys on the corner hawking crap". Amazon has always been that group of guys, it's only now people realize this.

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