Our New Overlords

Counterfeit goods: a crap version of a kosher product, right? So I thought, anyway, until I heard some extraordinary commentary this morning on BBC 5Live's Wake Up to Money Programme. I can find no reference to the story on the BBC web site, but they were discussing in junctions that the chemical giant BASF has brought against Chinese companies for producing counterfeit goods.

In some cases, they're supposed to have put some kind of colouring agent into palm oil and passed it off as motor oil. Palm oil, you may recall, is often sourced from rain forests which are the shrinking habitats of orangutans.

But I digress. Anyway, the extraordinary thing I heard was this: apparently it's true that that sometimes, companies discover that the counterfeiters are producing goods of a higher quality (purer yields etc) at a lower cost. Instead of pursuing them through the courts, they often sub-contract them or employ them outright to produce the goods under licence.

This strikes me as being, whilst pragmatic, ever-so-slightly hypocritical. But it also makes you wonder what's going on with the world, when the fakers are producing the higher quality goods for less money. Over at GuitarGAS we're very aware of the high quality of guitars etc. from China. You can get a Fender copy for very little money which is eminently playable and basically a good guitar. Or you can buy a Mexican-built Fender proper, or a Fender built in America (by, I suspect, Mexicans) and pay a lot more money for something just as good (or not!).