There is nothing that can not be copied. A black dwarf with a Golden nose is the Symbol for the Negative prize “Plagiarius”, a private club too brazen product pirates in the pillory, and at the same time on problems of the original manufacturer indicates. A valve for textile machinery, a toy-wheel loader, a roaster, a motion detector and / or a hand shower, there were a lot of fakes to see recently at the consumer goods fair Ambiente in Frankfurt am Main. The abusive price for blatant copies of high-quality, expensive products this year went, almost without exception, to manufacturers from China. “It will continue to plagiarize well,” says Plagiarius spokeswoman Christine Lacroix.
The valve, the Chinese company Ningbo has copied all of the elements of the original product of the Bürkert Werke in baden-württemberg in Ingelfingen, the toy-wheel loader the Bruder spielwaren GmbH from Fürth, the Chinese Hengheng Toys Factory is easy in small replicated, however, with cheap materials. Extremely brazen the Chinese Zhejiang Keland has the roasting pan of the company Zwilling from Solingen. Instead of cast iron, just a cheap aluminum was used.
safety and health threatened
It is not just about the bad quality of the copied products, says Lacroix. “It is also a matter of safety and health.” In General, the copies are taken out of the trade, which sent letters to three companies. Most do not respond. In a few cases, the original manufacturer can enforce a cease and desist letter, as recently in the case of the Roaster.
The prize winners are only the tip of the iceberg. The customs at the external borders of the EU in 2017 seized more than 31 million infringing products with a total value of 580 million euros. The Original producers sales and profits will be lost, you bear the costs of the usually high level of development. Arndt Sinn, Director of the centre for European and International criminal law studies at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, estimates that in Germany alone, 70,000 to 80,000 more jobs were available, it would not give the product – and brand piracy. In the whole of the EU, the loss of revenue through counterfeit clothing at 43 billion euros per year, almost of 520,000 jobs were lost.
Profitable product piracy
Alone in the German mechanical engineering industry, estimates the industry Association, VDMA, are affected more than 70 percent of the companies from the fakes. Damage: € 7.3 Billion. Here, too, it shows especially on China. Place in the domestic competition, so Germany follows with a share of 19 percent, Italy 18 percent.
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“Plagiarius” negative award for blatant copies awarded
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“For years, this source of income is attractive to criminal actors, but with piracy, earn more money than in the cocaine trade and the lower the risk of Detection, a lower sanction level and hardly persecution pressure,” says sense. The customs could only inspect two to five percent of the imports really. The illegal gains due to plagiarism by means of money would wash into the legal financial circuit introduced, weakness in the licit markets. Therefore, it is the plagiarism of a General social Problem.
