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Interesting, so is it immoral to sue someone who is blatantly copying your product and providing a much cheaper knock off with much poorer quality? I'm not sur

Interesting, so is it immoral to sue someone who is blatantly copying your product and providing a much cheaper knock off with much poorer quality? I'm not sure how I feel about this. Maybe it's just a bad idea to copy someone else's product unless you really plan on improving upon it. I don't imagine pop socket has a limitless budget for lawsuits either. They may really think they are doing the right thing here. I guess this is the gray market that he's talking about. All these companies that are just copying products and creating cheaper versions with worse quality. And amazon is facilitating that. Interesting and certainly worth shouting about.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
> Interesting, so is it immoral to sue someone who is blatantly copying your product and providing a much cheaper knock off with much poorer quality? That looks like a deliberate deflection. ikeboy specifically said that, while the lawsuit alleges inferior quality, that allegation is bogus. I would say that it is immoral to sue someone alleging inferior quality when the quality is not, in fact, inferior.
- ikeboy 7y ago
  Just wanted to clarify a bit of the legal terminology here. There's a loophole/exception to the first sale doctrine that says if the products are materially different, it can be considered trademark infringement even if the product was originally made by the brand. In some jurisdictions, there's a "quality control" subcategory of "material difference". The quality controls must be non pretextual. The basic argument is that if the brands's products are subject to quality control procedures that the alleged infringer is not following, then the products are different enough that it can potentially create a likelihood of confusion between the two. Only a jury can actually decide if there's such a material difference in a particular case. Now, quality control can be temperature controls, or it can be additional inspections before sale, and so on. It must be something where customers would care about the difference, so you can allege customer confusion. In these cases and in most of the vorys cases I've seen, the quality controls appear very pretextual. If the product is sealed, authentic, and there's no damage to it, it's hard to see why any consumer would care about any of the alleged differences in quality control. The cases I've seen where quality control was accepted by a court were typically imports, where there were actually different standards being used for the ones the brand was selling in the US. In my view, none of these would go anywhere if they made it to court. But that's very expensive - it's been at least several years that similar cases have been filed, I'm aware of over 100 so far across 30+ different brands, and as far as I know none have actually gone to a jury. Most settle well before that point, or are voluntarily dismissed.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    > If the product is sealed, authentic, and there's no damage to it, it's hard to see why any consumer would care about any of the alleged differences in quality control. If I understand you correctly, the only differences in quality control would be if there were quality control tests that these units failed after they were sealed. That seems... quite unlikely. Alternately, there were quality control tests that these units failed, but they sealed them in the standard packaging anyway. That also seems unlikely.
- plandis 7y ago
  Plus even if it was inferior that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe I can’t afford the nice thing at $x but can afford it at $x-1 dollars. That’s a benefit to consumers who would otherwise be priced out. I don’t think anyone would argue it’s immoral that Apple has an iPad alongside their iPad Pro.
ikeboy 7y ago
These are products that popsockets manufactured, sold to distributors, which then made their way to Amazon. It's not a copy, it's the real thing, just sold at a price popsockets doesn't like. Per https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/8/18215313/popsockets-ceo-david-barnett https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/8/18215313/popsockets-c..., they've spent over $7 million on lawsuits in 2018 alone. The article claims it's all about counterfeits, but if you read through the actual suits it becomes clear that it's not about counterfeits but mainly about what I described above. They want to protect their margins against discount retailers. It's nothing new, brands have always hated discount stores, and it's obviously extremely lucrative to get rid them if it enables your authorized sellers to get higher prices. There's a reason MAP policies (minimum advertised price) are so prevalent.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

> Interesting, so is it immoral to sue someone who is blatantly copying your product and providing a much cheaper knock off with much poorer quality? That looks like a deliberate deflection. ikeboy specifically said that, while the lawsuit alleges inferior quality, that allegation is bogus. I would say that it is immoral to sue someone alleging inferior quality when the quality is not, in fact, inferior.

ikeboy 7y ago
Just wanted to clarify a bit of the legal terminology here. There's a loophole/exception to the first sale doctrine that says if the products are materially different, it can be considered trademark infringement even if the product was originally made by the brand. In some jurisdictions, there's a "quality control" subcategory of "material difference". The quality controls must be non pretextual. The basic argument is that if the brands's products are subject to quality control procedures that the alleged infringer is not following, then the products are different enough that it can potentially create a likelihood of confusion between the two. Only a jury can actually decide if there's such a material difference in a particular case. Now, quality control can be temperature controls, or it can be additional inspections before sale, and so on. It must be something where customers would care about the difference, so you can allege customer confusion. In these cases and in most of the vorys cases I've seen, the quality controls appear very pretextual. If the product is sealed, authentic, and there's no damage to it, it's hard to see why any consumer would care about any of the alleged differences in quality control. The cases I've seen where quality control was accepted by a court were typically imports, where there were actually different standards being used for the ones the brand was selling in the US. In my view, none of these would go anywhere if they made it to court. But that's very expensive - it's been at least several years that similar cases have been filed, I'm aware of over 100 so far across 30+ different brands, and as far as I know none have actually gone to a jury. Most settle well before that point, or are voluntarily dismissed.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  > If the product is sealed, authentic, and there's no damage to it, it's hard to see why any consumer would care about any of the alleged differences in quality control. If I understand you correctly, the only differences in quality control would be if there were quality control tests that these units failed after they were sealed. That seems... quite unlikely. Alternately, there were quality control tests that these units failed, but they sealed them in the standard packaging anyway. That also seems unlikely.
plandis 7y ago
Plus even if it was inferior that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe I can’t afford the nice thing at $x but can afford it at $x-1 dollars. That’s a benefit to consumers who would otherwise be priced out. I don’t think anyone would argue it’s immoral that Apple has an iPad alongside their iPad Pro.

ikeboy 7y ago

These are products that popsockets manufactured, sold to distributors, which then made their way to Amazon. It's not a copy, it's the real thing, just sold at a price popsockets doesn't like. Per https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/8/18215313/popsockets-ceo-david-barnett https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/8/18215313/popsockets-c..., they've spent over $7 million on lawsuits in 2018 alone. The article claims it's all about counterfeits, but if you read through the actual suits it becomes clear that it's not about counterfeits but mainly about what I described above. They want to protect their margins against discount retailers. It's nothing new, brands have always hated discount stores, and it's obviously extremely lucrative to get rid them if it enables your authorized sellers to get higher prices. There's a reason MAP policies (minimum advertised price) are so prevalent.