On Guard Against Counterfeit Goods
As the exploding market for counterfeit goods has proven, authenticity isn’t everything – even if you can spot it.
The pale, hairless leg nudges mine again and my annoyance turns in an instant to excitement at the first glimpse of the bare skin above the sock. Another nudge and I lean in closer, mesmerized.
There’s nothing amorous going on here. The guy sitting next to me in the cramped row of seats keeps dozing off, and every time he jerks awake, his foot slips and touches my leg. What I’m trying to discern is the extra letter I think is stitched on his beige sock. I’ve made out clearly the first four letters, but there’s one more on that logo. At long last, the remaining i becomes visible to reveal his “Levii” socks.
I’m sitting in a banquet hall in Richmond with about 150 vendors, only three of whom are not Asian, listening to a presentation about counterfeiting and the reasons why merchants shouldn’t sell fake goods at their Richmond Summer Night Market booths. The presenter is Karen MacDonald, a lawyer with the Vancouver branch of Smart & Biggar/Fetherstonhaugh, a law firm specializing in intellectual property. Among the clients her firm represents: Chanel SA, Levi Strauss and Co. and Burberry Group PLC. It is with some amusement, then, that I notice, in addition to the man on my right with the Levii socks, that the woman on my left is digging through her “Guggi” bag searching for a pen to take notes, and just metres in front of MacDonald, another woman is listening attentively with what looks like a knock-off Burberry scarf knotted elegantly around her neck.
Counterfeits aren’t just in fake Louis Vuitton bags or knock-off scarves with the plaid Burberry designs, MacDonald informs the crowd. She rhymes off the evidence: knock-off drugs were linked in 2001 to at least 192,000 documented deaths in China; counterfeit car brakes made of sawdust were recovered from a bus crash in 1987 in which seven children were killed; and two per cent of airplane parts are estimated to be fakes. “There are safety issues involved. You can’t think of it as hurting big bad corporations. The economy hurts when you sell counterfeit goods. It results in lost jobs, lost taxes and decreases in investments.”
When MacDonald finishes, an official from the Summer Night Market steps up to the microphone, warning the crowd in Cantonese that the RCMP and private investigators will be watching the booths this summer. Enforcement is up, she says. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.
“So don’t sell counterfeit items. You’ll be caught,” she tells the crowd, before putting in a plug for one of the event’s sponsors: “And please, don’t sell counterfeit Pepsi!”
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