Your Kickstarter idea on sale in China before you’ve finished funding it (2016)
qz.com
qz.com
Just like piracy, it doesn't work that way. Far more people are willing to pay $10 for a selfie-stick phone case than $50.
Alternatively, I've also seen a lot of Kickstarters which were simply "marketing" for an existing yet not-so-well-known product available from Alibaba, with a substantial markup added. This means there is already significant "innovation" happening in China, contrary to what a lot of people think --- they just haven't seen the true scale of what manufacturing in China looks like.
If someone decides to take some time off to invent a new device and incur a financial risk to bring it to market, they should have the opportunity to profit from it. If new inventions are cloned within weeks in Asia and undercut the original inventor, where's the incentive to take risks on novel inventions?
If the invention was trivial, why didn't the Chinese manufacturers come up with it in the first place?
If no one owns a patent that covers the design then manufacturing a bunch of "copies" for a much lower price isn't illegal. It makes sense that kickstarter would be targeted as a source of not patented ideas to use.
Likewise, then the innovator has more money/resources to continue. A good example of this leading to exponentially growing success and greater scale innovations of inventors/entrepreneurs re-cycling their profits is Elon Musk's path.
They go to Europe or US to buy original products, not selfies sticks of course, because if the stick does not work that well is not important. But they buy medicines, they buy iphones, they even buy cars.
If someone believe that something as easy to replicate like a stick should make him extremely rich, then he is going to have to face reality.
Tell that to those who recycled 3rd grade, sometimes even used, ball bearings to build and sell a shitload of fidget spinners just a few years ago. We can't know how much people is willing to spend on a product if it hits the right string in their brains.
here's a thought.. if you dont want your stuff counterfited, dont outsource it to china. The companies loved the idea of "cheap labour" and also want the underpaid employees to be honest and loyal to them?
The "high price of low cost" at play here..
In this selfiestick, china is bad here.. but for a lot of the counterfits.. you sent china the moulds, templates, specs.. hmmm...
Jack Ma is correct, a lot of the counterfits come from the same factory someone outsourced to.. so what is the difference between a "counterfit" and "genuine" article other then price?
Unless the company buys a factory in some cheap labor country and sends some of their employees over to "manage" (police) the foreign workers, then there is always going to be a risk of loss with being so removed from the outsourced production.
(Then again, there's no guarantee the outsourced workers are going to get treated any better by foreign managers - look up the history of United Fruit Company for an example.)
Counterfeiting comes with the territory of using cheap labor/production in order to get more profit into the pockets of those outsourcing the business.
That's not to say counterfeiting isn't wrong. However, the validity of "wrong" becomes more of a gray area depending on which party you ask. Each party has their own motivations and those motivations have different socioeconomic impacts and ethical implications.
The counterfeit product has no incentive to ensure their product is of high quality, as long as it passes a cursory inspection before/after being bought. If you buy a brand X product and it fails after six months, you can complain to the company about it, you can post on social media to make it known that brand X doesn't last long, and so on. Brand X has an incentive to make sure their products last as long as customers expect them to, that they're safe, etc. as to not tarnish their brand image.
If you get a FakeX branded product, who do you complain to when it breaks six months later? The AliExpress seller is long gone, the FakeX brand is replaced by FakeX+1 brand, and you're pretty much SOL.
If the product has a major defect or safety issue, there are no recalls for FakeX branded products. How many hoverboards were recalled for being fire hazards?
Chinese plants generally give you what you pay them for. See how much crap you can buy in western shops, made by western brands, but "in China". It's not the "in China" part that's responsible for it, it's the pittance the western brand is willing to pay for manufacturing and controls.
Apple being a good example.. they have strict QA controlls and you never hear of a "second shift" creating fake iphones.
Ever complain to a brand and have them do something about it? most dont.
usually 'brand x' is more concerned with maximizing its profit margins, which is why they went to china in the first place (cheap labour, lax environmental laws...).
The cost of production is much lower there because living costs are lower. The lower we can get our living costs here in the US, the more wealthier and productive and more competitive we'll be. instead of focusing on relentless gdp growth, we should instead focus on what we can do to reduce costs everywhere here at home, that will make us more competitive.
When your product takes off, you have a potential recourse if you're ripped off.
No, but there are tons of handled/miniaturised telescopic devices. Antennas in portable walkie talkies and radios are an obvious example, there are umbrellas like that, and tons of other things...
After filing, the applicant has one year to file a utility application (what most people think of as a 'patent application') based on the provisional application.
The provisional app is never published. If there's no derivative utility app, the provisional sinks out of sight.
I forget the current utility filing fee, but it's a few hundred $ for an individual. Attorney's fees are in the few $K range and worth it if you have a valuable invention.
Unfortunately, you can’t really kickstart something before it’s major design phase. Well, you can but the Kickstarter would be missing too many details to be convincing.
In a way, the Western resellers are providing a service with their ad spending, in that I sometimes see products I like, trace them back to the original manufacturer, and buy them there.
Let's assume this situation remains in place for a long period and knowledge of it spreads widely. There'd be no more kickstarters like the one in the article.
How does this play out in the long term? What kind of world are we left with?
This is a massive philosophical “bug” in free software movement. It’s one of the goal to make software more accessible to everyone but under the reality of economics it does exactly the opposite. Once free software arrives on market, cheaper but slightly superior commercial versions will die out and only expensive superior versions will live benefiting more affluent class/organizations.
The hybrid models where you provide enterprise support for money while keep things free is interesting but I am still not sure that it can be as powerful when you can use full power of economy to drive resource scaling at fullest extent. Most companies which use this model run extremely frugal and usually can’t afford large scale research and development activities.
The things that has been described in article has already caused significant damages. There have been Chinese companies who received designs from innovators and started creating white label products. They didn’t had to worry about capital cost of arriving at that design or reliability to protect the brand reputation. They also didn’t care about doing R&D investments to evolve the product further. The focus was strictly on generating cheap knockoffs that produces short term profits and then move in to next victim. So in essence, your model of IP extinguished innovation, it’s evolutio and promoted cheap short lived knockoffs.
(On a side note as I don't want to derail the central point we're discussing:
> but under the reality of economics it does exactly the opposite.
Considering most computing devices on the planet are running an open source OS then this is surely open to debate)
You will see this pattern virtually everywhere when free software has become standard and it brings to halt research and development in that area that may require large scale capital.
I'm genuinely curious about what device you're talking about.
Would you mind sharing?