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Comment by newhouseb | Hacker News Reader

An interesting question is that if someone were to travel (non-commercially) across borders with a fake gucci bag, could that person could be held liable under ACTA for the case that a) they were aware of the product was counterfeit and/or b) the case in which they were unaware?

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It's beginning to sound like it's dangerous to buy anything whose essential feature is IP: movies, music, fancy luggage, watches.

I think the safest thing is to not buy these things. Buy the most serviceable and reliable vanilla physical products (a watch, not a Rolex). Don't buy music, and certainly don't have music or movies on your laptop when you cross borders.

Anything protected by commercial IP is becoming too dangerous to have around, legally obtained or not.

Yes. Near the French / Italian border there are targeted controls for counterfeited products. Common sense should tell you you can't get a Gucci bag for 200$, or anywhere outside of a luxury shop ;) And yes, you are also liable if you were unaware - but most people are actually aware.

- What if a person bought a fake Gucci bag for 50% of the price of original bag?

- What if it was a gift?

- What if he is not aware of the brand and thought it was just another bag?

Who cares. IP protection trumps basic common sense and basic human rights. And even though we all have to abide by inane protectionism schemes, we should not be allowed to directly vote on them, because direct democracy would make uninformed people make impulsive decisions and possibly introduce theocracies everywhere. So to prevent theocracy, we have to prevent direct democracy, which means we cant vote on copyright, which means we have to swallow down our pride and just abide by any IP protectionism scheme the informed overlords make in agreement with the industrial stake holders. There sadly is no middle way. It is either theocracy or IP protectionism. Pick one.

The swiss have a direct democracy and are not a theocracy.

Common sense should tell you you can't get a Gucci bag for 200$, or anywhere outside of a luxury shop

Where would a person learn this? I've heard the brand name Gucci before, but I had no idea it was so expensive. Naturally, I'm not the sort of person who would buy such things because of the name of the company who made them, but it also wouldn't seem strange to me to see a given brand on sale outside of a luxury store.

I guess we each have our own set of assumptions about what the "average person" should consider common knowledge.

I agree- I had no idea. $200 sounds expensive to me, so if someone offered one for that and I wanted to buy it for my wife I probably would. I've bought "Coach" brand for about that at the mall, so an approximately equivalent price wouldn't set off any alarms in my head.

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