Sharp To Americans: You Don't Want to Buy a Sharp-Brand TV (wsj.com) 115
Sharp has sued China's Hisense Electric, which licensed the Sharp brand for televisions sold in the U.S., accusing Hisense of putting the Sharp name on poor-quality TVs and deceptively advertising them (alternative source). From a report: The court action is the latest effort by Osaka-based Sharp to retrieve the right to use its own name when selling TVs in one of the world's largest markets. Sharp is trying to recover its position as a global maker of consumer electronics. Hisense rejected the allegations and said it was selling high-quality televisions under the Sharp name. The dispute illustrates the risks when the owner of a well-known brand name gives up control over products sold under that name.
Hit to the brand (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe if they didn't want their brand to take a substantial hit, they shouldn't have licensed it out.
Re:Hit to the brand (Score:5, Interesting)
This falls into the no-shit category, but let's wait for the PRC trolls to come and explain to us that we're mistaken about low quality products being made in China, and utilization of that particular business model being an epic mistake. I say this having been a designer of electronics, having seen what their factories do and just how difficult it is to keep them on task and pulling shady ass shit we explicitly asked them not to do. I cannot imagine how bad it is when you give up all control.
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We've seen how bad it is when you give up control, look at that latest Fantastic Four movie. It makes the unreleased Roger Corman licensing-placeholder look watchable.
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Funny, I kind of liked the movies starring Daniel Craig. The nature of the villainy felt reasonably plausible, both from the perspective of the goals of conspiracy among the villains and in the personal failings that individual villains had that left them open to vulnerability and thus defeat. It also felt more realistic, seeing Bond having to operate both in high-society circles and in the nitty-gritty. The Daniel Craig Bond movie I probably cared for least was Skyfall, but mostly because the technologi
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Eh, she was good in Rolling in the Deep but I did not like her weird high-pitch attempts in Someone Like You. The female larynx does not develop the same way as the male larynx does in puberty, so women generally cannot use the falsetto the same way men can. When she attempts to reach up out of her normal vocal range I do not find it terribly pleasant. Granted, the male falsetto voice isn't universally pleasant either, but for some reason her range-strain was grating to my ears.
Given the subject of Someo
Re: Hit to the brand (Score:1)
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Heh. Only songs of hers that I could identify are All I Wanna Do as a very stereotypical '90s song that was good enough I guess, and a cover of Sweet Child of Mine that I didn't care for mostly on-principle at the time she released it.
Her singing in All I Wanna Do was certainly adequate for a quick pop-alternative-rock tune. No idea how she'd fare in other stuff, haven't followed her career.
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See also: Madonna. Quite a nice-sounding voice in her natural range, but sounds like like a cat in pain when she tries to reach a higher register.
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We've seen how bad it is when you give up control, look at that latest Fantastic Four movie. It makes the unreleased Roger Corman licensing-placeholder look watchable.
I heard the musical version was much better.
Re:Hit to the brand (Score:5, Insightful)
My favorite tale of Chinese manufacturing is that factories making genuine products for Western companies have been known to put on extra shifts to turn out knockoffs, using the same machines and tooling that the Western company has paid for. I recall a significant number of fake Cisco products were found to be made in the same factory as the genuine stuff.
Handing your blueprints over to counterfeitors as well as paying for their machines is an almost comical way of slitting the throat of your business.
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Reminds me of the Chinese proverb: A capitalist will sell you the rope you use to hang him.
That is so 19th century. These days, the capitalist will, at the behest of the Government, charge you a fee for use of the rope with which you, yourself, is hanged.
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One I've heard was Lenin's supposed quote: "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." A few problems.
One, Lenin was not a pithy speaker. He didn't come up with great one-liners. The actual quote was "They [the capitalists] will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide."
Two, Lenin never literally said it. He never delivered this line publicly during his lifetime. He wrote it in some notes. These notes were collected after Lenin's death in 1924 and were eventually published in 1961.
Three, while I can't find the original text, I've heard the passage is taken out of context. Lenin's main point in the original manuscript was that some short-sighted communists thought they could work with capitalists and dupe them into serving communist goals. Lenin gave the passage as an example of what these people thought. But Lenin disagreed with trying to make deals with capitalists and was warning communists against trying what the quote suggested.
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It's possible to tighten-up the supply-chain though, so that one doesn't over-order subassemblies to the point that it's profitable to make authentic-clones of products, and it's usually good practice to employ your own quality assurance staff even if you've outsourced production where that staff gets to be your representative on the ground to attempt to mitigate this kind of practice.
Mind you I do think it's stupid to send-out the manufacturing to a place where the intellectual property is not respected, s
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I saw thing on TV, there's a factory making knock-of Land Rovers just round the corner from the official factory. If they run out of parts they could call their inside man and get him to chuck some over the fence, it's that close. Cheeky little bastards.
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This happens with pretty much every Chinese-manufactured product nowadays. A quick trip to AliExpress will find you nameless versions of well-known products for literally half the price.
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Try Taobao as well if you want to see decently made stuff (for the most part) at bargain basement prices. Even using a shopping agent like Taobaoring that adds an 8% commission, you can buy stuff dirt cheap, and have it shipped your way.
If you want a couple gross of fidget spinners for door prizes, it might be the place to go.
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All of Apple's products are made in China... Thus proving that China churns out low quality products :)
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No, their TVs are apparently pretty bad. Same with Toshiba sets in Europe, which are actually some re-badged Bulgarian brand IIRC.
Everything was fine until smart TVs came along. Before that it was actually hard to make a bad TV. Buy a panel from Sharp or LG, buy an off-the-shelf video decoding and processing chip that handles each country's DTV format and some image enhancement, and you have a perfectly reasonable TV. There was just nothing left at the low and middle ends of the market except for cost reduc
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KInd of makes sense. Onmce you make it smart it becomes a computer and you need an OS (even if it's a minimal one) plus all the user facing apps, a GUI ... none of that shit is trivial. Even "proper" software companies make a balls of it sometimes.
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The problem with the cheap Hisense TVs isn't just the smart features. Lots of us don't use those anyway, we just hook the TV up to a Roku or Fire TV or Chromecast or a set-top box from the cable guys. Everybody who bought a smart TV will probably stop using its smart features within five years because they will be hopelessly out of date.
The real problem is that they don't deliver good picture quality. You'll see various problems like color banding, bad implementation of variable backlighting that cause the
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Maybe if they didn't want their brand to take a substantial hit, they shouldn't have licensed it out.
Apparently this was done when Sharp was taking a nosedive and really needed the money, so presumably they felt that the alternative was going bust altogether.
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Then they don't have a lot of room to complain about their deal-with-the-devil unless the contract specified the nature of the quality of the final products in ways that can be objectively measured and quantified.
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My experience from Sharp has been that they were second tier compared to some other Japanese brands. Their stuff works but isn't very inspiring.
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The Sharp Aquos series was top quality some years ago. Then Sharp split the brand so the low-end was the outsourced crap and the high-end was still good. I guess at some point they started outsourcing the high end; big mistake.
The Department of No Duh (Score:1)
Outsourcing gives you unpredictable quality? Gee, who wouldda thought!
Re: The Department of No Duh (Score:2)
They licensed the brand name. The company makes its own products, with their own specs and choices, and puts the licensed name on it. The Sharps company makes money from licensing their name, sort of like a Harley Davidson branded pencil.
My question is, is this really outsourcing?
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Maybe if they didn't want their brand to take a substantial hit, they shouldn't have licensed it out.
That doesn't follow. Licensing in an of itself has no impact on the brand or the quality. It's all about *how* you license it. Though if it got as far as a lawsuit it would seem the licensing contracts didn't have oversight, but the flip side of the coin is the fact that they are being sued about quality is an indication that quality was a controlling factor of the license.
You can't license away quality control, but you most definitely can license away a lot of the rest of the business without any issue.
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Sure it follows.
If you license-out the brand name itself then it's very likely that problems won't be discovered until after product has shipped and harmed the brand. After all, the company that has paid for the right to use the SHARP brand has that contact saying they're allowed to do so; the burden to demonstrate that there's an issue falls on the company that licensed-out that brand.
If the owner of the brand wanted to protect the brand they should have retained direct involvement in how the brand is use
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discovered until after product has shipped
So what you're saying is you omitted the requirement for independent quality control before shipping from your license agreement.
Allow me to quote myself for prosperity:
It's all about *how* you license it.
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No, it's about what the licensee does with it. In this case, they're apparently smearing it with shit and hitting crippled orphans over the head with it.
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It's all about *how* you license it.
No, it's about what the licensee does with it.
So what you're saying is it's about *how* you license it. Because you know, that is precisely what permits or denies a licensee from doing something.
Re:Hit to the brand (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe if they didn't want their brand to take a substantial hit, they shouldn't have licensed it out.
At the time, I gather from another article [engadget.com], Sharp was hard-up for money. They've since been bought out...by Foxconn. Pot calling the kettle black, much?
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It stands to reason that this breaches the name licensing agreement they have; I can't imagine they would consent to their name being attached to inferior products being marketed deceptively.
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Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't.
We haven't seen the contract. We do not know what the verbiage surrounding product quality, if any, is present in the document. We don't know anything about unit count, quality range, warranty, or anything else.
It's possible that all of this is properly enumerated in the contract, but it's also possible that the licensor's terms were poorly spelled-out and that the licensee is free to do exactly what they're doing.
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Companies do this at times, usually because it helps out the short term finances. Especially if the company is on the decline but the name still has value. Getting that short term cash can help the company stabilize. Sometimes after a lot of growth the company may not be able to manage it all and wants to push out a side line with its name to an outsourcer.
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These are the people that just told everyone that Sharp stands for shit TVs with the lawsuit and wants the brand name back. Then they'll wonder why the sales have tanked along with the brand image in a couple quarters. It's not like there are a bunch of geniuses running the show over at Sharp.
Sharp is for LUDDITES. (Score:1)
Apps!
Hisense USA is actually not horrible... (Score:2)
Re:Hisense USA is actually not horrible... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hisense USA is based in Atlanta (Suwanee GA), not China, though their parent company is Chinese.
All that means is that there's a shell company that imports drek from China, handles local customer disservice and warranty non-fulfillment.
Nearly every multinational company does the same thing -- Apple's Ireland shell company has made a lot of news lately as a tax haven, IIRC. That doesn't make Apple an Irish company.
Sharp gear was always crap anyway.... (Score:4, Informative)
It sure did pay the bills back in the '80s when I worked in TV/VCR repair. The TV sets regularly caught fire when the flyback transformers carbonized (prompting a class action lawsuit and a huge settlement), and their VCRs were a constant source of mechanical issues, far worse than most of the competition.
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I have a Sharp television, manufactured in the 70s, in the USA, even. Still works perfectly, and is still our only set. Has never been repaired or serviced.
Re: Sharp gear was always crap anyway.... (Score:1)
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Article is paywalled (Score:3, Informative)
and I'm not giving my money to Rupert Murdoch.
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That's OK.
I paid for the article twice to even things out.
Tough. Suck it up Sharp. (Score:4, Insightful)
You sold the rights to your name to make a quick buck, now stop whining when someone uses it in a way you don't like. If you wanted your name only to be associated with good (ok, reasonable) quality gear you should have kept it in house.
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Don't knock it, it worked for the USA President (depending on how you define "worked")
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If you wanted your name only to be associated with good (ok, reasonable) quality gear you should have kept it in house.
That is 100% dependent on the terms of the license. You understand that word right? License? Not sale. They don't own the brand, they just have a license to it.
Re: Tough. Suck it up Sharp. (Score:2)
Umm... This is Slashdot. We aren't exactly known for understanding the concept of the word, 'license.' How many times have you heard/read someone say they bought the program, music, movie, or OS? How many times have you read someone say that they own things they don't actually own?
With enough money, you can probably get Microsoft to sell you software, or an operating system. However, it is probably gonna cost a whole lot more dollars than expected.
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You sold the rights to your name to make a quick buck, now stop whining when someone uses it in a way you don't like. If you wanted your name only to be associated with good (ok, reasonable) quality gear you should have kept it in house.
They are not whining, they are conniving. They sold off the name rights in the US market when they were tanking as a company. Now that they recovered a bit, they want the name back and are using this as a means to get out of the existing agreement.
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Actually, it's "hara-kiri."
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I tried making a witty Japanese response, but slashdot kills my unicode. What could possibly be the matter? Surely Slashdot supports unicode?
Slashdot to unicode wa ketsugo shimasen
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Score: 5, Funny.
(Was going to say "you must be new here," but a low-6-digit uid isn't all that new anymore.)
Why not discuss boobs on Japanese terrestrial TV? (Score:2)
I tried making a witty Japanese response, but slashdot kills my unicode.
I'd have said you should try Slashdot Japan [slashdot.jp] instead, but it's no longer known by that name. (#)
Never mind, they've got a fantastic story on "How did the boob disappear from the terrestrial TV in Japan [googleusercontent.com]" which informs us that
According to the article, the boobs gradually began to be purged from the golden time since 2000, and the last "tits" in the terrestrial wave of Tokyo was seen on TV Asahi of January 7, 2012
Good to know, I'd been wondering that myself.
(#) Apparently it's still owned by OSDN, which sold the main Slashdot site several years ago- maybe they no longer have the rights to the name?
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Alas my Japanese is not that good. I'm still learning basic grammar, trying to get to grips with Kanji and my vocabulary is limited.
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(Given how mangled two-way translations to and from Japanese are, though, I wouldn't risk it for anything important!)
Why would you buy from them (Score:1)
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Re:Why would you buy from them (Score:5, Informative)
Sharp was a top tier brand -- Sony and Sharp co-funded an LCD panel factory, and Sony TV's used Sharp's LCD panels. (The whole reason Sony was involved in the factory is because they wanted Sharp's LCD panels).
The problem is that Sharp happened to buy the factory just before the housing crisis -- and the market for new TV's vanished overnight. If you took any time to look outside the world of the PlayStation, you'd see that Sony had some serious problems selling their TV & home theatre products during the same period.
With nobody buying, Sharp was unable to sell their own TV's, or LCD panels to Sony. State-sponsored/funded Chinese companies swooped in as the market was picking up again, and Sharp wasn't able to recover.
So yeah... Sharp was unlucky in its timing of building a factory, and the PRC's government decided it was in their interest to spend government money to bankrupt a foreign company. Nothing new about either of those things.
Naked License (Score:2)
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apply.... revocation
Almost. In its response to the lawsuit, Hisense will argue, as an affirmative defense, that the SHARP trademark has been abandoned due to the naked licensing. There's no "application" to anyone and the court need not and won't "revoke" the trademark registration- it may instead order the Commissioner to cancel it.
Honestly (Score:3)
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But is that a problem with the retailer, or with the manufacturer? Your TV was likely bought from Sharp directly.
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Your TV was likely bought from Sharp directly.
On the contrary, I suspect it's unlikely that Sharp would require the licensee to conduct all business (including distribution) through themselves; I doubt either party would find that workable.
I suppose it's possible in some cases that a licensee might have a legal subsidiary with (e.g.) "Sharp" in its name, but I'm pretty sure the stores know who they're buying from anyway, and that doesn't appear to be the case here:-
The fine print on the back of a document no one will read explains it is not a Sharp TV.
Guessing it says something like "'Sharp' trademark used under license by Cheap Generic
pffff (Score:2, Troll)
TV and movies is entertainment for dump, primitive people
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"are" not "is", and you probably meant "dumb" not "dump"...
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Sharp have no reputation (Score:4, Interesting)
Can't remember when Sharp had a reputation worth defending but it wasn't this century! Here in the UK HiSense is now a more respected brand than most Japanese brands that went down the licencing cheap foreign factory built crap route long, long ago.
Licensing trademarks (Score:2)
I think licensing or selling of trademarks should be illegal altogether.
The whole point of trademark law was not to create some kind of "intellectual property" that the holder could license or sell, or be sold off as an asset in a bankruptcy sale.
The point of it was to protect consumers. So that when you bought a bottle of "Bass Pale Ale" (one of the oldest trademarks in the world), you could be reasonably sure it was made by the right people, and not some cheap knock-off. Consumer protection.
When tradema
or Toshiba (Score:2)
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Horse puckey. Sharp had a number of quite nice [wikipedia.org] products over the years which were ahead of their time. If you ever had one of those TRS-80 pocket computers, you were running a Sharp device and didn't even know it due to the cross branding.
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If you ever had one of those TRS-80 pocket computers, you were running a Sharp device and didn't even know it due to the cross branding.
Depends- some were apparently made by Sharp, others by Casio [wikipedia.org].
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I had a Sharp calculator in high school, avoiding the whole HP vs TI gang wars. I liked it very much. Kept me going in high school, college, work, and was even in use in grad school after that. Doesn't work now, but it's the early generation LCD display that is busted.
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That's debatable. I have a 40" HiSense TV at home which i paid US$220 for and i have zero complaints about its quality. The panel itself looks the same, if not better than any Sharp 40" offering at about twice the price.
Anyway, didn't Sharp licence its brand name to HiSense?
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Sony had their premier line of equipment that they sold from specialty stores or mom and pop shops that dealt in quality, not quantity. They were sold next to SHARP, Toshiba, LG and Samsung.
Samsung associated with quality? Guffaw. Sure, they make shiny black boxes, but the quality of their implementations are very low.
Samsung PVRs, for example, throw "Invalid format" errors all over the place when trying to play streams over DLNA but then you put those same streams onto a USB hard disk or key and it'll play them quite happily. Even when it does play streams over DLNA it doesn't pay attention to aspect ratio and always shows them at 16:9. Play the same streams from a USB hard disk or key and it
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And my TV is an even lower brand called Changhong. It's was the cheapest set I could get with three HDMI and 40" of screen, and it's been fine. Knock on wood.
$200 at Walmart -an experience that forever killed me on using WalmartDOTcom for anything again, but that has nothing to do with the TV.
It seems Changhong is mostly sold by Newegg now, also a Chinese-owned company.
Interestingly, the TV I got shares the same IR remote control codes as my older Toshiba TV, which was made before Toshiba sold the rights.