Αδυσώπητα και αλύπητα η καπιταλιστική ανάπτυξη εξανεμίζει κάθε ίχνος της ασύδοτης κερδοφορίας των "πολυεθνικών" κολοσσών που οφείλουν τα κέρδη τους αποκλειστικά και μόνο στην επιβολή από το Κράτος, των αντικαπιταλιστικών νόμων περί "πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας". Έτσι όλος ο κόσμος, τα πλατιά λαϊκά στρώματα, οι φτωχοί, οι εργάτες και οι προλετάριοι, που θα πέθαιναν από την πείνα επί κομμουνισμού, μπορούν να καταναλώνουν αγαθά που άλλοτε κατανάλωναν μόνο οι πλούσιοι και οι ευγενείς, σε προσιτές για όλους τιμές.



Why Alibaba's Massive Counterfeit Problem Will Never Be Solved


The world’s biggest online retailer courses with an unprecedented torrent of counterfeit and sham goods, and neither the big brands, the Chinese government nor U.S. pressure can do much about it. Jack Ma, the most powerful businessman in Asia, can. But shutting down the fakes would undermine his Alibaba empire.

Be warned: Jack Ma, the man who oversees the world’s largest online retailer and whom Forbes ranks as the 22nd most powerful person in the world, really doesn’t like lawyers. Especially those attacking the very underpinnings of the $200 billion empire he’s built. As rail-thin as ever, Ma almost leaps off the sofa in his Hangzhou office when talking about the fancy New York attorneys who have sued him for trademark infringement and trafficking in counterfeits on behalf of their client, Kering , the French luxury goods conglomerate that owns Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. There’s no chance, he insists, of settling.

“I would [rather] lose the case, lose the money,” says Ma. “But we would gain our dignity and respect.”

That is true if he means respect in the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of small Chinese entrepreneurs who’ve made a living on Alibaba’s online bazaar, called Taobao. To Ma, whose Chinese retail sites handle five times the volume of eBay–last year $394 billion of, well, everything–these sellers are his lifeblood. To the sellers Ma is a hero of capitalism, offering them a path to the middle class. In the center of this social compact, however, is an unacknowledged truth: The Alibaba juggernaut has been constructed to a significant degree on illegal, counterfeit products.

The scale of the fakery is enormous–at any given time Taobao offers millions of suspect goods for sale, from handbags to auto parts, sportswear to jewelry. When Forbes searched for listings on Taobao with the word “Gucci” and set the preferred price range under 300 yuan, or less than $50, well below the price of real Gucci products, 30,000 results popped up. The sellers of 4 of the items on the first page confirmed in online chatting that they hire factories to produce these wares using the original design. A large number of the rest are of designs similar to those of Gucci products, with slight alterations, such as the replacement of the letter “G” in a handbag’s pattern with “D.”

NetNames, a firm that helps brands fight online counter­feits, says that its clients believe as much as 80% of the merchandise sold as theirs on Taobao is fake. That’s backed up by Dan McKinnon, head of global brand protection at sneakermaker New Balance. Since the Boston company has no authorized dealers on Taobao, McKinnon figures that at least 80% of the supposed New Balance products sold over the site are counterfeit or suspicious. Alibaba, for its part, won’t hazard an estimate.
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In some ways it can’t afford to. Ma pulled off the world’s biggest IPO last year on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $25 billion. Alibaba’s revenue more than doubled over its last two fiscal years to $12.3 billion, while net income nearly tripled, to $3.9 billion. Ma is personally worth $21.8 billion. What would happen if Alibaba eradicated fake goods from its shopping sites–if that were even possible? Harley Lewin, a veteran intellectual property lawyer at McCarter & English, has an opinion: “They’d go broke.”

Ma has no interest in that outcome. But he also has incentive to get ahead of the narrative prior to executing Alibaba’s audacious next phase: moving from a giant in China to retail dominance worldwide . That requires building trust with consumers everywhere–trust that could be undermined by a buyer-beware reputation. “Jack Ma has made a lot of money,” says William Forsythe, brand-protection manager at the North American unit of Japanese automaker Nissan Motor. “But if he is going to have a marketplace that has a global footprint, he needs to put a system in place to protect international trademarks.”

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