Isn't the heart of IPR simply bullying?
OEMs make items for everyone. Bang & Olufsen 42" Plasma screen tvs are made by panasonic. This example nothing remotely wrong was done, but the mindset behind IPR is bullying people, as we see so often.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
Hi John,
Re: protecting intellectual property rights, I thought I might relate this little personal tale of woe.
A couple of years ago, I had made contact with a Chinese company that produced what is called bjd’s or ball jointed dolls. Originally developed in Japan, these are 10”-14” resin dolls which are fully articulated with 9-14 ball joints and have distinctive animee like faces. They come either blank (owner adds eyes, wig and clothes) or fully painted and dressed. They range in prices from $300 and on up into the thousands.
This particular Chinese company was selling a blank 10” doll for $60 a piece. I ordered ten, had a workshop in my doll studio for five participants…I painted two for myself and had a few left over. I decided to list them on Ebay for $90 each, and just listed them as “blank” bjd’s.
I got bids on two, but then one day I got an email from a bjd collector who advised me to check a blog site popular among bjd owners called Den of Angels. It was an “invitation only” blog site.
There I found a lively exchange about my selling these 10” dolls on Ebay. The comments were vitriolic. I was accused of being a thief and selling copies of a doll I never heard of…a “YoSD”. Some were calling for my being blacklisted on Ebay. Others wanted the Japanese company to sue me! Since I could not defend myself on that site ( surprise…surprise… I never did get an invitation) I contacted the person who originally warned me.
She was very helpful and after discussions with her and a lot of research I found out that the company I was ordering from actually produced the 10” dolls for the original "YoSD" brand-label in Japan and then marketed the exact same doll, but without the “YoSD” label. The collectors on DOA were upset because, as they claimed, I knew the dolls were copies of the Japanese original, that I was selling them as originals at reduced prices and that this was under-cutting the value of their expensive dolls.
I contacted my lawyer and she assured me (and I in turn related this to my email benefactor) that I was not doing anything illegal, because I was not claiming MY dolls were the “YoSD” dolls. In good faith, however, I removed the listings from Ebay.
To this day, I feel that I was bullied into losing those sales. But I fought back a little…I told the woman who originally emailed me to let her blog cronies know that I would sue them and DOA for slander/libel if the comments did not stop. A bit of blustering on my part, but the comments stopped.
OEMs make items for everyone. Bang & Olufsen 42" Plasma screen tvs are made by panasonic. This example nothing remotely wrong was done, but the mindset behind IPR is bullying people, as we see so often.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
1 comments:
I find it surprising that by licensing their products and even producing it for others, big companies are much kinder than smaller companies who would sue you instantly for patent infringement. The same illusion is present with governments. You would think that local governments like City and County are better than the Federal government, when in fact local governments bully us the most.
Where can we read more about OEM practices? Also, where can we read about HP using Canon technology, Lincoln using Ford parts, and Bang & Olufsen using Panasonic parts? What makes OEM manufacturers license their work when they could make a lot more money by having a monopoly?
Please write more posts about IPR. As you can see, this is a very interesting topic and you get a lot of feedback from it.
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