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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

There are two separate issues with a fake pair of Levis. Does the customer know they are fake? And do the friends of the customer know they are fake?

The first is an easily solvable problem - Levis Corp could create a registry of verified vendors, which customers could check before buying.

The second one is the problem the law is trying to solve. People often buy a bag with a G written on it that they know doesn't come from Gucci. They get the status benefit of Gucci without actually paying $1000/bag.

I.e., it's basically a back door way of bringing back sumptuary laws: it's illegal to display status unless you have status.

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You can't put a value on status. How do you propose they enforce it?

Furthermore, what's to stop me from sewing a Levi's tag on a pair of Wal-Mart jeans?

There are bigger fish to fry, let the free market run its course.

I propose they enforce it selectively, because everybody knows that a certain class of people is entitled to show status, and that certain other classes of people are not entitled to it. "Sumptuary laws". I like that term. It lets The Police take a few people down a notch or two when they're getting too big for their britches. Yeah!

We are way down the rabbit hole here: from outlawing the sale of jeans labeled "Levi's" produced by some Chinese company without an arrangement with Levi's, to evil classist laws against wearing Levi's unless you're part of the upper crust (wut?) and now all the way down to saying that the point is to let the police abuse people.

No, seriously, this part REALLY IS about selling goods with misleading labels... Levi's are not especially expensive, you can buy them easily at the thrift store, and none of this has anything to do with letting the police abuse people.

In NY, counterfeit goods are often sold in the following way. You buy a bag that looks like a Hermes bag, but the label is blank. You get to choose your own monogram for it for $20 extra. I.e., you go to chinatown and pay a guy to write "Hermes" on an unlabeled bag. Such operations are often shut down by undercover cops.

Are you really going to argue that this is about misleading labels, when the customer deliberately chose the misleading label?

If it were about misleading labels, it would be legal to sell fake Levi's as long as you post a sign saying "Attn Customer: This is NOT real Levi's". It's not about misleading customers. It's about protecting the profits of status sellers.

Maybe part of SOPA has the effect you desire. Nevertheless, you've missed the part of the policy argument where you show that the proposed solution does not cause more problems than it solves, and the part where you do a cost/benefit analysis. These two parts often go together, as a huge cost is often often one of the problems of a proposed solution.

But, seriously: if it's all about trademark protection, why not call it "Stop Online Trademark Infringement"? Why bother to conflate it with copyright infringement (a.k.a. "piracy", arrr, mate!), even in the title of the bill?

Either SOPA is a mess because the concept of "IP" has led to conflating trademark problems with copyright infringement, OR it's a deliberately bad piece of legislation, introduced under one name in order to get it passed, but intended to be used for entirely different purposes. I know, false dichotomy fallacy, but still...

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