Irresponsible Study Claims Counterfeiting Is A Good Thing
by Justin Fenner | 4:42 pm, August 31st, 2010
An adviser to the British Home Office has co-written a study claiming that counterfeit designer goods aren’t really that bad for the fashion industry, The Daily Mail reports. In fact, the study claims, counterfeit goods have less of a financial impact on the rag trade than we previously thought, and that selling fake Louis Vuitton Speedy 25s on the side of the road is really a good thing:
Professor David Wall, who co-authored the report and advises the government on crime, said the real cost to the luxury goods industry could be one-fifth of previously calculated figures.
‘It’s probably even less,’ he said yesterday. ‘There is also evidence that it actually helps the brands, by quickening the fashion cycle and raising brand awareness.’
He added: ‘We should be focusing on the trade in counterfeit drugs, dodgy aircraft parts and other stuff that really causes public harm.
But that misguided pronouncement takes for granted that counterfeiting is an honest business that operates within the bounds of other legitimate enterprises. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The reason that counterfeiting is called counterfeiting is because it’s illegal, and for Wall or anyone else to say that it’s not as illegal as, say, the international trafficking of drugs, smacks highly of stupidity and snobbery.
Just because someone sells a low-rent copy of a high-end bag does not mean he or she is a nice person who’s interested in getting fashion on the cheap. It means he or she is engaged in a criminal activity that largely relies on child labor and seedy customs officials who are on the take. Making fake bags is just as bad as making fake currency, and it does serious damage to a multibillion dollar global industry that shoulders its fair share of our world’s economy. Why counterfeiting in fashion should be taken any less seriously than counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical industry, we’ll never understand.
In fact, when the good people at Harper’s Bazaar hosted a panel on anti-counterfeiting measures in May, they found that the business of counterfeiting supports terrorism, takes money away from hardworking people and can even be hazardous to your skin — a L’Oreal employee at the panel said we probably wouldn’t want to know what was in knockoff cosmetics.
To wit, industry insiders told The Daily Mail that counterfeiting really is bad for business:
A spokesman for Louis Vuitton said: ‘The sale of counterfeit goods is a serious offence whose revenue funds criminal organisations at the expense of consumers, companies and governments.’
A spokesman for Burberry said: ‘Counterfeiting is taken extremely seriously. Where a case is proved, Burberry will always push for the maximum penalty.’
The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) insisted that far from making consumers happy faking fashion goods was ‘not a victimless crime’.
‘Businesses, individuals, and the public purse all suffer as a result of such activities,’ said a spokesman.
And we’re inclined to agree with comments like that from people who actually know something about the fashion industry. Wall himself has an impressive CV and has written a long list of books about crime and the Internet, but we were hard pressed to find evidence that he could tell Chanel from Chloe. So we’re gonna stick with the camp that says fake fashion really is a bad thing.
[The Daily Mail via NYMag]
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Spinout Doctors: How New Venture Partners Saved Freescale’s Magnetic Memory and Other Stranded Technologies
Wade Roush 9/2/10
Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory, or MRAM, promises to change everything about how our computing devices work. It’s as fast as classical static RAM at the core of today’s microprocessors, but it doesn’t wear out, and it also holds data permanently, even when the power is off, like today’s flash memory. It could enable true “instant-on” information devices and speed up many types of computation.
Freescale Semiconductor, the former chipmaking division of Motorola, poured a lot of effort and money into making MRAM practical in the mid-2000s. But the technology almost wound up homeless, because Freescale is a microprocessor manufacturer, and wasn’t equipped to sell storage devices. The company had developed the technology without ever really intending to get into the fiercely competitive memory business.
Which is where New Venture Partners entered the picture. The San Mateo, CA-based venture firm purports to be one of the only venture firms in the world that specializes in finding promising but under-supported technologies inside corporate R&D labs and spinning them out as independent startups. Yesterday we published the first part of a conversation with David Tennenhouse, a former Amazon and Intel research executive who’s now a partner at the firm. In 2008, Tennenhouse and New Venture Partners helped to spin out the MRAM business from Freescale in the form of Everspin Technologies, which is now one of the world’s leading suppliers of MRAM for industrial, aerospace, and military applications. The details of the Everspin case, which illustrated many of the nuances and challenges of the spinout process, are among the highlights of Part 2 of our conversation, transcribed below.
During this part of our talk, Tennenhouse also described how the firm identifies teams and technologies that can be spun out profitably, what types of companies are likely to house potential spinoffs, why Google doesn’t do spinoffs but Microsoft does, and the roles that NVP’s partners must sometimes take on—including career counselor.
X: Can you walk me through a couple of your favorite examples of companies you’ve helped to spin out?
DT: One of my favorites is Everspin, where we spun out all the MRAM magnetic memory technology from Freescale. That’s an area where Motorola [which spun out Freescale in 2004] invested for many years and Freescale invested for many years. It’s the only group shipping real, working MRAM. It’s a great example, because one of the things you need is leadership in the team that is really headstrong and committed. Here you’re talking about a new semiconductor; a new material. They managed to get this all the way into customers’ hands. This was a hell of a dedicated team and they really wanted to foist this thing on the world.
Another critical ingredient is that the CTO at Freescale, Lisa Su, really wanted to see this thing happen also. But Freescale looked at the situation and said, ‘We don’t really want to be in the merchant memory business.’ If you could replace on-chip Flash memory with MRAM, that would be very interesting to Freescale, but first you would have to …Next Page »
Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at 415-796-3024, or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.
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