Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
Well, more retail fakery in good old Kunming. You may recall our recent reports on the fake Apple stores in this fair south China city. Still no word on how Steve Jobs is reacting to those fake bits of entrepreneurship, even though the Chinese government shut a couple of them down. Now it looks like Apple isn’t the only company to have its carefully considered and, oh yeah, trademarked retail appearance high-jacked by Chinese counterfeiters. Swedish home-furnishing and lifestyle giant Ikea is the latest to have its retail environment illegally copied, right down to the chair designs and the famous yellow and blue signage colors. In fact, pretty much everything but the meatballs. This is apparently a growing trend in China, where slick businesspersons are no longer content to merely create and sell fakes of famous-maker handbags and shoes. The Kunming store which copied Ikea’s retail look and feel is called 11 Furniture. But unlike the fake Apple stores which sell authentic merchandise, 11 Furniture does not make or sell authentic Ikea products. Customers who buy at 11 Furniture get furniture which is made to order and is not presented as real Ikea product. In our previous report about fake Apple stores, we briefly discussed the legal concept of trade dress, a form of intellectual property which describes the design of a product or the proprietary design of the building or retail environment in which the product is sold. At the link, you’ll get more details on how pervasive the problem of trade-dress ripoffs is getting in China. And even though 11 Furniture didn’t copy the meatballs, we’re kind of curious how lingonberry jam would taste on the minced braised pork the store does sell. (Reuters – Fake Kunming Ikea Store)
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This one is pretty hard to believe, particularly when the punch line is that the offending parties have claimed they didn’t know they were breaking the law. It seems a couple in Dongguan, Chinas old each of their three children in the last couple of years in order to obtain cash for playing online games in Chinese internet cafés. Apparently, the man and the woman in this relationship, both under the age of 21, met and bonded over a mutual obsession for online gaming. Here’s the sequence of events: The youngsters had a baby boy in 2008, then another child in 2009. After the second child, another boy, was born they decided to sell him to get cash for online games. Then they decided to sell the first child, and got about $4,600 for him, ten times the amount for the first kid. Then, when the couple had a third boy, they sold that little guy for the same amount is as the first boy, which is the second kid they sold. Confused? Well, so was the mother of the woman who bore the children. And when she found out what her daughter and her boyfriend had done, she turned them both in to the authorities. A few more details are available at the link. Let this be a warning that it would be better to quit World of Warcraft than to start seeing dollar signs on your kids when you feel short of funds. (ABC News Radio – Selling Kids for Online Gaming Cash)
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China is a problematic country to those of us in the west, particularly because of the things we read and hear about the policies and actions of the communist government. Cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai and the Special Economic Zones in places like Guangdong Provinceseem pretty wide-open and free, while the rest of the country mostly suffers from the oppressive, bureaucratic grind of the central communist authority in Beijing. So it seems ironic, at least to us, that a video game company in Shanghai would borrow the political and aesthetic themes of Chinese communism to create and promote video games for fun and profit. But that’s just what Shanghai game company Online Technology is doing. Starting at the end of this month, two communist-themed games will be widely available on both the web and on iPad. The web game, “A Spark Can Set the Foreston Fire”, has players battling and conquering enemies by disseminating communist theory. The iPad game, “Red Campaign”, makes the player participate in three battle campaigns set during the Second Sino-Japanese War. And both games, according to the company, were created to celebrate the upcoming 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. Okay, we are all used to video games that glorify violence, but communist politics? It might be fun to check these games out to see how such concepts fit into your gaming comfort zone. (CNNGo – Chinese Communist Video Games) Here is a direct link to the Online Technology website (in Chinese). Links to the communist games are at the bottom.
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Last week we reported the story of an American blogger in Kunming, China who discovered and nicely documented a fake Apple store in that city. Well, she didn’t find one, but three, or so we reported. But it turns out there are, or were, actually FIVE fake Apple stores happily selling iPods, iPads and Macbook Air computers, and other Apple gadgets. After the news broke here and in other media sources of the American blogger’s discovery, Chinese officials almost immediately descended on Kunming to confirm the existence of the fake Apple outlets and determine what to do about them. Well, it seems that Chinese laws regarding the legal concept of “trade dress” (the visual appearance of a product or the retail environment in which it is sold) are a bit different than they are in the EU or the U.S. Because despite the fact that all of the stores were faked to look almost exactly like a legitimate Apple store, three of them have been allowed to continue operation because they were found to be selling completely authentic Apple merchandise. The other two stores have had operations suspended while Chinese trade and law-enforcement officials investigate the authenticity of the Apple-branded merchandise offered for sale. We don’t know how Apple and Steve Jobs are reacting to this ongoing retail fiasco, but much of the news coverage we have reviewed is monitoring this story with healthy doses of both disbelief and bemusement. This surely does not mean that what these fake Chinese Apple shops are doing is right. It isn’t. But the situation is kind of funny when you think about it, and the story might make an entertaining documentary at the very least. (Asian Correspondent – Five Fake Kunming Apple Stores) Additional details about the two suspended stores can be read here.
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We turn now from the story of fake designer furniture in China, to the story of an expatriate blogger who has apparently found an entire counterfeit Apple store in the Yunnan Province city of Kunming. In fact, she thinks she found three, all within walking distance of the others. According to her report, which you can read at the link, the first clue that the first store she encountered was fake were the words “Apple Store” printed in proximity to the famous Apple logo on the front of the store and on various signs within it. Another clue was the employees’ name tags, which only identified the store’s gurus as ‘staff’ and not by name. In the blogger’s estimation, the store is definitely fake but “a beautiful one—the best ripoff store we had ever seen.” After you see the photos she took of the place, it’s pretty likely you’ll be inclined to agree. The striking thing, of course, is the apparent size and audacity of the construct. It certainly belies the stereotypical vision of shady vendors on the streets of Hong Kong or Shanghai selling fake goods or real goods of questionable origins out of rundown storefronts. (BirdAbroad blog – Amazing Fake Apple Store)
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