Super Bowl Bust: Feds Grab 307 NFL Websites; $4.8M 198
coondoggie writes "Speaking at a National Football League press conference ahead of this weekend's Super Bowl, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said special agents this week seized a total of 307 websites and snatched up 42,692 items of phony Super Bowl-related memorabilia along with other counterfeit items for a total take of more than $4.8 million – up from $3.72 million last year."
Mathematics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More bad news? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, doing nothing but spending all your money and working is not enough to stop you getting sued or arrested for violating some random-ass law.
Re:Mathematics (Score:4, Interesting)
When the DEA busts a grow house each plant is said to produce 1lb. So why would they not want to inflate prices to make it look good.
One thing I always wondered ... (Score:4, Interesting)
What counts as counterfeit goods? They always offer up fairly big numbers to justify these raids, but they rarely offer up enough details for the public to judge the real value of what they're doing.
I'm bringing this up because I saw a news story that showed some counterfeit goods a few years ago. While some of them were pretty convincing, a lot of the stuff involved questionable cases of trademark infringement. One such example were batteries that used the colour scheme from a popular brand of batteries, yet everything else was distinguishable from the "genuine" goods (e.g. it went under a completely different product name). Claiming that they were counterfeit would be like claiming that Monopoly money was counterfeit.
Re:China (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm more interested in how much money was spend doing the seize. I could imagine that tax bill may exceed the ~$5 million depending on what equipment they bought and how many people they paid to track down/seize/value all the stuff.
Re:great use of our tax money (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's probably more about low-hanging fruit.
Remember, when someone buys drugs they're buying something they generally know is illegal, same with the seller. Both have a personal interest in keeping the transaction as low-key as possible.
A purchaser of sports memorabilia is not looking to buy anything illegal. That means that the sellers of sports memorabilia in general are not low-key, and have to seem legitimate, which could open them up to investigation if the copyright and trademark holders do a good job of documenting the supply chain. Remember, many products have minimum costs per the resale agreement, and any price coming in under that price could automatically trigger a more thorough look. If one is counterfeiting memorabilia and is not aware of the minimum price, attempting to undercut legitimate resellers to drive sales could attract attention.
I know this because years ago I worked for a small business that did all manner of technology and equipment work. Among the company's offerings were OEM software products, and remember, the definition of OEM back then was loose enough that one could buy a copy of Office or Windows as an OEM product if buying a qualifying hardware product, which could mean something as cheap as a Microsoft mouse. Well, the owner of the small business found a supplier of Windows and Office that let him sell for really, really cheap, and he advertised. A few days later, an investigator on behalf of Microsoft stopped by. He and the owner talked, and basically the rep was willing to exchange all of our copies of everything we had bought for resale in exchange for being given the information on the party that sold us the software. It probably worked that way because we had about fifteen products, not exactly a mecca of commercial piracy. He collected the counterfeits, gave us real ones, and left with contact information. Before he left he explained the supply chain that Microsoft used to distribute, and how prices really never fell below a certain threshold for current products.
Back to this situation, if the real owners and producers of the licensed memorabilia have a supply chain with defined prices, it's easy to catch sellers who have unlicensed product if you just watch for their ads.