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Comment by starky | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this is the reality of manufacturing easily copied goods. Since it is so difficult to sue a vendor to stop selling your product in China, someone will just copy your design and start selling it for less than you can. Even if you get the item taken off Amazon, they will continue selling wherever else they can unless you invest a ton of money in a legal team to aggressively stop them from importing product to North America.

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This isn’t just a knock-off, this is a company who stole all my branded imagery which I paid thousands for photoshoots. They stole our copy as well. I understand this is part of business, what I don’t understand is how Amazon is allowing this to happen.

That was interesting. You carefully outlined a clearly delineated issue and the poster conjured up some overarching philosophical point and responded to that instead.

I bet it was like dealing with Amazon all over again.

Perhaps they're confused by the images you submitted. In the image with the man's hand in his pocket, the 'copy' has details that don't exist in the original:

- More of the man's hand and shirt cuff

- Seams on the front of the shirt and trousers

So, at least at first glance, it seems impossible for the left image to be a copy of the one on the right. Perhaps you had previously used a more zoomed-out version, and they copied that?

When I see replies like this, I am made aware that some people see the world dramatically different from me. To me, this is about as close to just directly copying everything as you can get. To point out the seams is to lose the forest for the trees.

Genuine question, does copying to you mean that it has to be exact? Like, if there are small, meaningless differences, then it's not copying?

No, he means that the OP has a cropped version of the image and the “counterfeiter” has an uncropped version of the same image.

If the counterfeiter really stole the images how could he have a less cropped version.

Maybe Amazon also sees things like this and decided they can’t tell who stole from whom.

I don’t that is the case here but it is possible Amazon gets all sorts of notices like this from people who aren’t as genuine and may be lying to remove a competitor.

I agree here. This isn't a case where someone took a similar picture. The pictures are identical except OPs is more cropped than the competitor.

This is similar to a common practice in the art world where you photograph the borders of a painting before framing it. If there's ever any doubt about whether the painting was swapped for a forgerie, just look at the photos of the borders and compare them.

I'd have similar questions if I was on the Amazon team receiving this complaint.

I think it's plausible that the Chinese cloners never bought the original product but instead hacked his server that had all the photos and schematics to produce the product on their own. No, I don't have any evidence for that being the case, but I think it possible with this being the direct method counterfeit groups use to knock off most things from Western countries.

I mean, if the company is copying your product already, why would they go to the effort of coming up with new marketing?

Amazon has no incentive to actually go after counterfeit goods, they get paid either way, so any team that would investigate counterfeit claims is a pure cost to them. Due to this they do the bare minimum to prevent further regulations being brought down that they would have to comply with.

This is why we need an actual competent politician who takes China seriously and is willing to use a lot of American resources to fight things like abuse of IP law, etc.

> unless you invest a ton of money in a legal team to aggressively stop them

How much is a ton of money in this case?

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