Why? These days chinese factories are pushing superb 4130 clones for the price of a decent seiko.
This guy in the video seems to know nothing at all about the chinese watch industry.
You can get a non-replica Chinese watch.
You know nothing about the business and are just coming up with things
>and it’s a violation of copyright and trademark
I’m not sure that this would make it immoral, and how does this affect the customer anyway? As far as immoral things businesses do this one seems extraordinarily mild, hardly any cause for boycott.
I rather doubt this has anything to do with morals.
> I’m not sure that this would make it immoral, and how does this affect the buyer anyway?
It doesn't just affect the buyer. It affects the company being faked.
And it's illegal, so you're helping a criminal enterprise.
Sure, but I don't think that this makes manufacturing, buying, or selling fakes immoral. Most fake watches are sold to people who know that they're buying a fake watch.
>It affects the company being faked.
I don't believe you. Rolex isn't losing any sales because of fakes.
>And it's illegal, so you're helping a criminal enterprise.
This hardly seems like a real argument. There are many places where it's criminal to get high or be gay.
Edit: And the fake watch makers copy those anti-counterfeiting measures. That's how we know your story about buyers being aware of what they're buying falls apart.
Sure, Rolex has their LEC but that probably has more to do with identifying OEM crystals than anti-counterfeiting.
What anti-counterfeiting measures were you thinking of? I can't come up with many.
It's usually not very hard to source OEM crystals, so to me it seems more likely that this would be about third party crystals and not counterfeit watches.
Can you think of any other supposed anti-counterfeiting measures besides the laser etched crystals? If this is something that the watch companies actually pursued it would be weird if they stopped at just that.
Seiko 5's had laser etched crystals as an anti-counterfeiting measure, and then, because counterfeiters copied that, they switched to open casebacks, an anti-counterfeiting measure that is used across the industry.
"Counterfeiting costs the watchmaking industry billions each year."
- Nick Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group.
It's hilarious that you're so invested in this that you resort to attacking my character.
>they switched to open casebacks, an anti-counterfeiting measure that is used across the industry
I would assume that open casebacks are used because they look cool, not to prevent counterfeiting.
>"Counterfeiting costs the watchmaking industry billions each year."
>- Nick Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group.
I think this is bullshit, I doubt you can find any data that would support this claim. I can't. I'd bet he just took some estimate of replica industry total revenue and decided that's how much it costs the legit watchmaking industry.
I take this with the same giant heaping of salt that I'd take with claims that the record industry loses billions per year because of mp3s, or movie companies because of bittorrent. They were never going to see those sales. The market size at price $0 is much, much larger than that at anything higher. Wishful thinking at its purest.
I second, with emphasis, ryanlol's rejection of your ideas about counterfeits being somehow immoral. I don't buy counterfeits but would have zero moral qualms about doing so - it doesn't even enter my mind. To be honest I have difficulty believing anyone seriously believes buying a counterfeit watch is truly immoral. If you actually do believe that - wow, we live in different worlds.
I find it hard to take seriously anyone who outsources their morality to whatever the law happens to currently be wherever they currently are. Laws vary wildly across both time and space. Anyone claiming their morals just follow "the law" is actually admitting they don't have their own morals at all.
Even if it was legal to violate trademarks and commit fraud, you'd be paying people who are sneaky, lying sons of bitches.
Seems like the immorality of supporting organized crime would depend entirely on the nature of the crime being committed.
>commit fraud
Who is being defrauded?
>lying sons of bitches
Who is being lied to?
I would suggest that anyone buying a $50 "rolex" is not, in fact, being defrauded, and if they are - well, they kind of deserve it.
Then you need to stop using the term "organized crime" because it has a pretty specific meaning. If it's "any criminal enterprise" then we just call that "crime" - and once again, you are referring to the law to define morality.
> People are making $10000 fake Rolexes
What. Not they are not. Your outlandish claims need evidence. Show many any example of someone who paid $10k for a fake Rolex.
That meaning is a criminal enterprise. The mob is organized crime. Drug cartels are organized crime. Any organization against which RICO might be used is organized crime.
> If it's "any criminal enterprise" then we just call that "crime".
No, just “crime” doesn't require an enterprise. A criminal enterprise is organized crime.
$10k seems about right for a fancy solid gold frankenwatch. These pop up for sale on forums sometimes, but they tend to be built by watchsmiths as a hobby and have almost nothing to do with the replica industry being discussed here.
The fact that people send their fakes to Rolex to get serviced (which then get confiscated) is proof that they don't know they bought a fake.
Counterfeit watches are a serious problem; the American Watch and Clock Institute sell a DVD on identifying fake Rolexes, with the target audience being professionals in the watch industry. Innocent parties can (and frequently do) pay large sums of money for worthless fakes.
https://www.awci.com/online-store/dvd/
It's one thing selling a replica "Bolek GMT-Master" with a standard ETA movement in a white box, but it's quite another thing to sell a very convincing counterfeit complete with Rolex-branded packaging and a counterfeit certificate of authenticity. If the counterfeiters are so honourable and have no intent to deceive, why don't they discreetly engrave the word "REPLICA" on the caseback, case, movement main plate and bracelet?
The moral line in the sand is putting the word "Rolex" on the dial. I have absolutely no issue with someone making a watch that copies the form and function of a Rolex watch, but I take great exception to someone using their name.
Trademark is an absolutely essential part of modern commerce. Trademark infringement is tantamount to identity theft - counterfeiting is a fundamental attack on the reputation of the counterfeiting victim and has a corrosive effect on trust. There are legitimate arguments against patent and copyright law, but I see no legitimate argument against trademark law.
Are you talking about online or offline scams? The fake watch seems pretty useless if you're just scamming people online, you don't need to ship the buyer anything at all. A fake watch would only act as a temporary cover for such a scam possibly allowing the scammer to scam more people, but it's completely unnecessary for the scam itself.
Offline, how does that even happen? I guess maybe if you're a pawn shop operator.
>If the counterfeiters are so honourable and have no intent to deceive, why don't they discreetly engrave the word "REPLICA" on the caseback, case, movement main plate and bracelet?
Why would they need to do this? They aren't scamming anyone, a vanishingly small fraction of their customers are. If a factory started doing this they would just be unnecessarily putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
I don't know you, but I'd guess that you're probably demanding far higher standards from watch counterfeiters than the businesses you actually deal with. Unless you're the most conscious consumer ever you're almost certainly regularly doing business with companies committing far worse offenses than trademark infringement.
Being illegal does not make it immoral.
some people spent A Lot of money in design for some malicious smartass chinese guy to come and copy and sell by 10 times cheaper....This is Absurd. Some people are loosing their jobs , see , maybe me myself, i am loosing a job because of Falsification...
Besides, Is not really necessary, Come one, people should come out with their Own watch design right?
It should be not so hard to draw a sketch with a New design, right? Its not like painting the Davinci's Monalisa, right...
At least my opinion, like they say in the Good Wife Series.
Who exactly is losing their job because of fake watches? I do not believe that you will be able to present any convincing evidence that replica watches are actually hurting the sales of genuine watches.
>Lot of money in design for some malicious smartass chinese guy to come and copy and sell by 10 times cheaper
What do you think about homage watches? Most people don't seem to have a problem with those, the guy in the youtube video specifically says homage watches are OK.
If you aren't familiar with homage watches, look at this: http://i56.tinypic.com/k4hug1.jpg
man...if you were an inventor , and spend time inventing something nice, them you don't make money out of it, would you like that?
I would think that this is extremely uncommon. I think the following scenario is more likely:
"X buys fake watch, X likes fake watch, X buys the real watch"
>who is the owner of the design?
The whole fake/not-fake thing usually has very little to do with the actual design of the watch, but the branding.
"X buys fake watch, X likes fake watch, X buys the real watch"
And is that 16% margin due to "R&D" eating into them?
Or do they calculate their margins after hefty executive bonuses, lavish corporate offices, and other "expenses"? Not to mention that they also run all kind of boutique shops of their own and venture into various areas outside watches.
I just want to respond to this because we see a lot of the same comments in the software industry and I think it dilutes the meaning of the law to speak imprecisely.
If you make a watch and put a brand name on it for which you have no license, that is a trade mark infringement. It is illegal in most countries. It is not theft. Theft is where you take something that belongs to someone else, thereby depriving them of it. Infringement is where you use something that belongs to someone else, often without depriving them of it. They are different things, both legally and morally.
There are design patents, and I suspect that there are probably design patents for watches (although I've never looked). If you copy a design that is patented for which you have no license, you are infringing the patent. This is illegal in most parts of the world (but probably different parts of the world than trademark infringement). It is also infringement, not theft.
Fashion designs can not by copyrighted under most (all?) international treaties. If you make a watch that looks similar to another watch, but that does not infringe the trademark, nor infringe any design patents, then you are not infringing at all. It is neither illegal, nor immoral (IMHO anyway) to do this. However, it may be fraud if you try to pass it off as something it is not, which is illegal, of course.
Karl Lagerfeld, the famous designer had an interesting comment about look-a-like copies. When prompted in an interview (unfortunately I can't remember which programme it was on) for his opinion about people who buy knock bags he replied something to the effect of, "Those people are not my customers. None of my customers would buy those bags. Neither would customers who are happy with a knock off bag want to buy my bags. It makes no difference to me". As much as I realise that not everybody will have such an expansive point of view, I've always thought it to be an incredibly wise position to take in the fashion industry.
https://www.ft.com/content/1625afaa-925c-11e3-8018-00144feab...
Serves them right, since most of the "high end watch" industry is selling 10x overpriced items to rich show-offs and overpaying suckers.
I'm not talking one-of-a-kind, manually crafted pieces with valuable materials here. I'm talking even the "low end" 2-10K watches, with BS generic mechanisms, and costing nowhere near that to make.