Man Is The Media.
When fake turns original
July 24th, 2007 by Martin
I’ve been meaning to write something semi-intelligent about fake products. Here’s a first rough draft.
I’ve had the idea for this post, ever since I last summer was in Sri Lanka that was swarmed by Asian manufactured copies, mainly of wrist watches and clothes. I was amazed to see how the copyists were able to copy, manufacture and distribute their fake versions of new collections, even before the originals had been marketed!
In Europe, the ‘style police’ seem generally more successful in keeping the copies off the main streets, but not in Sri Lanka where the copy products are sold in the open, even in malls, where no one even bother pretending they are original.
It got really strange when I was offered a not-yet-released original Helly Hansen jacket on a misty mountain top market in Nuwara Eliya amongst thousands of copies (you can tell it’s original when the price is five times as high as the rest of the supply and there’s only one single piece available; not to mention the flawless quality). The reason was, I learned, that Helly Hansen is actually being manufactured in Sri Lanka, as are several other major clothing labels.
From iPod to Meizu
Obviously the market for fakes is huge, fast and distributed, sometimes even more so, it seems, than the industries they copy. In (post)communist regions, where the collective mindset has been favoured instead of praising the individual genius (as has long been the case most parts of the West); intellectual property means less. But I was wondering, not least inspired by the silly infinite monkey theorem and recent hive mind theory, when the repeated act of copying and collective mass production becomes so boring and tedious that you start to innovate? Could one even imagine situations where, after copying something enough times, you start to see where the innovative potential is hidden?
I believe that one example could be the Meizu M3 player I bought a few months ago; directly from China where it is produced. I of course risk the chance of public ridicule by saying that I bought this purposely instead of an iPod, which the majority of sane people in the world will tell me it is a filthy copy of.
New from the old
But I’m not gonna go into details here about why I think Meizu’s M3 is better than an iPod Nano and you shouldn’t just take my word for it.
Instead, you should take my many words for it in this geeky review where I do go into minute details about the player (Update: Someone tells me that the near-genius navigation bar is copied from Creative. Postmodernists have argued that in fact most ideas are already out in the open, and the only way to create something new is to juxtapose the old in new constellations. This is hardly the case in our world of rapid prototyping and light speed technological advances, but one could speculate of the near perfect products that could be made, were there no such thing as patents and trademarks. I know of no lawsuits against Meizu yet, but if they start selling big (and I think they might be about to) lawsuits will come, regardless if Meizu are copyists or innovators. And that’s often a dirty game where the company with the biggest legal budget wins).
Of course, another obvious examples of copyists-turned-innovators could be some Japanese car manufacturers and hifi manufacturers. And I believe we will see the same phenomenon happening much faster in China, if it isn’t already.
Now, I’m just hoping that innovation will grow to include the social and environmental spheres to a higher degree than with what once was begun with Western industrialisation.
(Picture: Warhol’s Mao portraits)
