Simon beat me to this one because I still haven’t had time to read this week’s Economist – that’s the problem when it arrives on a Monday and you have to work for a living.
He has noticed this story about fake watches in China. Well, actually it’s a story about the ‘surprising’ success of Omega in selling genuine watches when much cheaper copies are available. Simon comes over all moralistic:
But somewhere in the back of my mind is the moral dimension. Fakes are effectively a form of stealing. The original creator goes through the effort and expense of designing, manufacturing, marketing and selling the product only to have it ripped off in a matter of weeks and selling at a fraction of the price. There are rationalisations – just look at the fuss over “free” music over Napster, Kazaa and the like. These fakes may stimulate demand for the real thing. People who buy the fakes may never buy the real thing. But let’s face it, just like taking songs for free of the net or fake DVDs, these fake watches are just wrong.
Surely the conclusion we can draw from this story is that the markets for genuine and pirated are often very different. If you want, and can afford, a genuine Omega or Rolex watch you will unlikely to be satisfied with a copy. Equally, most people who buy copies would never buy the genuine article. In fact, the existence of fakes is proof that the original is desirable, and may even increase sales.
Of course, these companies will carry on saying that they expect the PRC government to do more to stop piracy, and one of the ironies is that the public destruction of copy watches is good publicity both for the originals and the fakes, but in reality it is not a major problem. Strangely the Economist seems to have a bit of a blind spot on this subject.
Ordinary Gweilo 
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