woof!
Bronze Member
- Dec 12, 2010
- 1,185
- 413
- Detector(s) used
- BS detector
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- #41
@ Escape: If you want the authoritative report, that would be for example myself and Carl who are posting in this very thread. I've been in this industry for 34 years, worked for several manufacturers, and the "used market" was something that as manufacturers we gave almost no thought to one way or the other. We don't manufacture used, we don't buy used, and don't control the markets where used are bought and sold. We service used of course, but prefer that what we ship new never needs to return to the factory. Warranty policies vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and various things get factored into that: it impacts the used market but that's just one of several factors.
Cheap Chinese beepers and rebranded and slightly redone knockoffs have been a part of the low end of the market for a long time. We didn't like 'em, but it ain't a perfect world. Outright counterfeiting is a relatively new phenomenon. Minelab got hit first, I guess about a decade ago. We got hit about 5 years ago, and White's shortly thereafter. Garrett's been counterfeited but I don't know the history on that. I don't think Tesoro has been counterfeited but there are probably fake counterfeiters where you can pay for counterfeit Tesoros and never receive any merchandise (or perhaps receive a substitute Chinese cheapie as a sort of joke, your recourse is with the seller, good luck with that!). The impact of counterfeits on the USA market hasn't amounted to much because no dealer wants to be the first to make the front cover of the gold & treasure mags in handcuffs.
The big problem is overseas where USA law doesn't apply and local and international law enforcement may be either inadequate or corrupt, especially in third world markets where customers are not well informed about the products but do recognize reputable trademarks. The emergence of the importance of third world markets happened rather quickly and we weren't well prepared for it. Not only did legitimate manufacturers lose huge amounts of sales to fraudsters, the customers mostly thought they were buying the real thing and when it turned out to be junk the counterfeits ruined the reputations of the legit trademarks in many markets. It's been a huge change in our business climate and adapting to it has been very costly. The problem is never going to go away but we (I'm referring to the legit manufacturers, not just FTP-Fisher) have gotten better at dealing with it than we were several years ago. For obvious reasons I can't go into all the details, but it's including negotiations with foreign governments esp. China, using international law to clean up some of the abuses that have been facilitated by the Internet (think Alibaba, they know us), industrial espionage inside the factories of counterfeiters, collaboration between competitors in arranging seizures of counterfeit shipments, constantly changing methods of identifying the real things from the counterfeits, tighter control over distribution, improved anti-counterfeiting measures in the actual designs, the list goes on and on. It's all a bunch of stuff that billion-dollar companies are accustomed to, but metal detector companies are not in that league and having to play those games has taken a heavy toll.
There isn't enough justice in the world, but there is some. In Muslim Africa where the culture really frowns on theft and burning a customer, there have been instances where customers who got burned reduced the gene pool of fraudsters, thereby discouraging others from dealing in counterfeits. And as governments have taken more interest in artisanal gold mining as a way of keeping people employed instead of joining rebel groups, they've recognized the importance of rational distribution of mining supplies. About half a year ago a regional counterfeiter kingpin who thought he had everyone paid off missed a couple of officials in one country and made the mistake of going there. I'm not privy to the correspondence he's had, but I like to think that he's sent at least one letter to Dick Cheney begging to be extradited to Guantanamo.
Now back to that silly stuff about legit manufacturers grinning like Cheshire cats over how counterfeiters have ruined the used market. As manufacturers the new market is the one we sell into. We neither support nor fear the used market, our competition is other manufacturers, not FleeBaay. Legit competitors we respect. Counterfeiters are by definition thieves, and we don't respect them. And if overseas justice is sometimes a bit more vicious than what we would regard as civilized, I won't say that we shed many tears at night over the fate of the criminals who get caught. Now that they're not engaged in ripping off customers, let 'em lead the fight for more humane prison conditions.
********
[EDIT] China is painted as the heavy in this story because that's where the counterfeits are manufactured. It's not that China is somehow evil or bad, it's just that historical process has led them into conflict with other civilizations with different perspectives.
In the developed West, we have this concept we call "intellectual property", comprising especially copyright, trademarks, and patents. Most folks don't realize that these are new concepts, with only trademarks having a long history.
I suppose that all civilizations recognize trademarks as being valuable IP, but without a broader context of IP, methods of dealing with counterfeiting weren't very systematic. To the extent that there may have been applicable and enforceable law at all, it usually fell in the category of business fraud. And business fraud involving a single piece of merchandise was a matter that would rarely merit the involvement of government officials: police and rule by law in the modern sense are themselves novelties in the historical context. It was both buyer and seller beware. And still is in much of the world.
China was a civilization back when Europeans were still swinging from trees, and had printed newspapers before Europeans had toilet paper. (I'm exercising a bit of hyperbolic license there, but there's an underlying truth to the thing.) The Confucian ethic doesn't naturally lead to the concept of intellectual property, and neither did the Maoist philosophy. And although the Maoist philosophy may have been conducive to the concept of cops and courts everywhere for everyone whether they wanted 'em or not, the Confucian view of society didn't support that.
China is physically located in a vast network of river basins that facilitate both irrigation agriculture and the development of canals for transportation, and surrounded by vast mountain and desert and ocean barriers that isolated it from the rest of the world. Where Europe gets thoroughly remapped every several centuries, China has been some version of the Middle Kingdom for thousands of years. The Wall of China failed to keep the Mongol nomads out, but within a couple generations the Mongol conquerors became themselves Chinese and the world went on as before. When Europeans showed up in onesies twosies as tourists and intellectuals, Chinese society could accommodate them. When European warships showed up, that historical Chinese xenophobia kicked in full time. With the USA protecting its national interests with military presence in the western Pacific, Chinese xenophobia still runs high. Despite the strivings of many Chinese at all levels to enter into and participate fully in the "new world order" globalized socioeconomic arrangement without wasting energy on any more warfare than is absolutely necessary. They've read their Sun-Tzu.
And, they're trying to do this without any concept of "intellectual property". From the inside of the beeper business, we see how the counterfeiters try to develop marketing channels in the USA: they're completely bewildered by the lack of interest. The idea that what they're proposing is criminal activity in this half of the world doesn't register with them. The concept is so strange that even after it's explained to them, there's no category for the explanation to get plugged into so they keep doing the same thing and getting the same result.
It will take a long time for the concept of IP to get serious traction in China, because nothing in their culture naturally leads in that direction. At the same time, the concept of IP in the developed "West" is evolving, with serious debate over what should be patentable and how much disclosure needs to accompany IP protection.
So, all this talk in the beep biz that you hear about "Chinese counterfeits" etc., I wouldn't want anyone to mistake it for ethnic prejudice. If I'd been born in China in 1946 instead of in Sacramento, I might have become the chief engineer in a counterfeit electronic products export company. Without the slightest thought that there was anything particularly reprehensible in doing that. Trademark infringement might be kinda shady, but it's shady at the point of sale to the end customer and it's non-Chinese people of the same nationality as the end customer who are deceiving the customer. When it leaves the port in China, it's just a piece of electronic equipment that someone paid the factory to crank out.
*******
Cheap Chinese beepers and rebranded and slightly redone knockoffs have been a part of the low end of the market for a long time. We didn't like 'em, but it ain't a perfect world. Outright counterfeiting is a relatively new phenomenon. Minelab got hit first, I guess about a decade ago. We got hit about 5 years ago, and White's shortly thereafter. Garrett's been counterfeited but I don't know the history on that. I don't think Tesoro has been counterfeited but there are probably fake counterfeiters where you can pay for counterfeit Tesoros and never receive any merchandise (or perhaps receive a substitute Chinese cheapie as a sort of joke, your recourse is with the seller, good luck with that!). The impact of counterfeits on the USA market hasn't amounted to much because no dealer wants to be the first to make the front cover of the gold & treasure mags in handcuffs.
The big problem is overseas where USA law doesn't apply and local and international law enforcement may be either inadequate or corrupt, especially in third world markets where customers are not well informed about the products but do recognize reputable trademarks. The emergence of the importance of third world markets happened rather quickly and we weren't well prepared for it. Not only did legitimate manufacturers lose huge amounts of sales to fraudsters, the customers mostly thought they were buying the real thing and when it turned out to be junk the counterfeits ruined the reputations of the legit trademarks in many markets. It's been a huge change in our business climate and adapting to it has been very costly. The problem is never going to go away but we (I'm referring to the legit manufacturers, not just FTP-Fisher) have gotten better at dealing with it than we were several years ago. For obvious reasons I can't go into all the details, but it's including negotiations with foreign governments esp. China, using international law to clean up some of the abuses that have been facilitated by the Internet (think Alibaba, they know us), industrial espionage inside the factories of counterfeiters, collaboration between competitors in arranging seizures of counterfeit shipments, constantly changing methods of identifying the real things from the counterfeits, tighter control over distribution, improved anti-counterfeiting measures in the actual designs, the list goes on and on. It's all a bunch of stuff that billion-dollar companies are accustomed to, but metal detector companies are not in that league and having to play those games has taken a heavy toll.
There isn't enough justice in the world, but there is some. In Muslim Africa where the culture really frowns on theft and burning a customer, there have been instances where customers who got burned reduced the gene pool of fraudsters, thereby discouraging others from dealing in counterfeits. And as governments have taken more interest in artisanal gold mining as a way of keeping people employed instead of joining rebel groups, they've recognized the importance of rational distribution of mining supplies. About half a year ago a regional counterfeiter kingpin who thought he had everyone paid off missed a couple of officials in one country and made the mistake of going there. I'm not privy to the correspondence he's had, but I like to think that he's sent at least one letter to Dick Cheney begging to be extradited to Guantanamo.
Now back to that silly stuff about legit manufacturers grinning like Cheshire cats over how counterfeiters have ruined the used market. As manufacturers the new market is the one we sell into. We neither support nor fear the used market, our competition is other manufacturers, not FleeBaay. Legit competitors we respect. Counterfeiters are by definition thieves, and we don't respect them. And if overseas justice is sometimes a bit more vicious than what we would regard as civilized, I won't say that we shed many tears at night over the fate of the criminals who get caught. Now that they're not engaged in ripping off customers, let 'em lead the fight for more humane prison conditions.
********
[EDIT] China is painted as the heavy in this story because that's where the counterfeits are manufactured. It's not that China is somehow evil or bad, it's just that historical process has led them into conflict with other civilizations with different perspectives.
In the developed West, we have this concept we call "intellectual property", comprising especially copyright, trademarks, and patents. Most folks don't realize that these are new concepts, with only trademarks having a long history.
I suppose that all civilizations recognize trademarks as being valuable IP, but without a broader context of IP, methods of dealing with counterfeiting weren't very systematic. To the extent that there may have been applicable and enforceable law at all, it usually fell in the category of business fraud. And business fraud involving a single piece of merchandise was a matter that would rarely merit the involvement of government officials: police and rule by law in the modern sense are themselves novelties in the historical context. It was both buyer and seller beware. And still is in much of the world.
China was a civilization back when Europeans were still swinging from trees, and had printed newspapers before Europeans had toilet paper. (I'm exercising a bit of hyperbolic license there, but there's an underlying truth to the thing.) The Confucian ethic doesn't naturally lead to the concept of intellectual property, and neither did the Maoist philosophy. And although the Maoist philosophy may have been conducive to the concept of cops and courts everywhere for everyone whether they wanted 'em or not, the Confucian view of society didn't support that.
China is physically located in a vast network of river basins that facilitate both irrigation agriculture and the development of canals for transportation, and surrounded by vast mountain and desert and ocean barriers that isolated it from the rest of the world. Where Europe gets thoroughly remapped every several centuries, China has been some version of the Middle Kingdom for thousands of years. The Wall of China failed to keep the Mongol nomads out, but within a couple generations the Mongol conquerors became themselves Chinese and the world went on as before. When Europeans showed up in onesies twosies as tourists and intellectuals, Chinese society could accommodate them. When European warships showed up, that historical Chinese xenophobia kicked in full time. With the USA protecting its national interests with military presence in the western Pacific, Chinese xenophobia still runs high. Despite the strivings of many Chinese at all levels to enter into and participate fully in the "new world order" globalized socioeconomic arrangement without wasting energy on any more warfare than is absolutely necessary. They've read their Sun-Tzu.
And, they're trying to do this without any concept of "intellectual property". From the inside of the beeper business, we see how the counterfeiters try to develop marketing channels in the USA: they're completely bewildered by the lack of interest. The idea that what they're proposing is criminal activity in this half of the world doesn't register with them. The concept is so strange that even after it's explained to them, there's no category for the explanation to get plugged into so they keep doing the same thing and getting the same result.
It will take a long time for the concept of IP to get serious traction in China, because nothing in their culture naturally leads in that direction. At the same time, the concept of IP in the developed "West" is evolving, with serious debate over what should be patentable and how much disclosure needs to accompany IP protection.
So, all this talk in the beep biz that you hear about "Chinese counterfeits" etc., I wouldn't want anyone to mistake it for ethnic prejudice. If I'd been born in China in 1946 instead of in Sacramento, I might have become the chief engineer in a counterfeit electronic products export company. Without the slightest thought that there was anything particularly reprehensible in doing that. Trademark infringement might be kinda shady, but it's shady at the point of sale to the end customer and it's non-Chinese people of the same nationality as the end customer who are deceiving the customer. When it leaves the port in China, it's just a piece of electronic equipment that someone paid the factory to crank out.
*******
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