I purchased a “replica” handbag from a woman who had an ad in the back of our daily paper. One of my friends says that it is illegal to buy “fakes”.
Is this true? If so, why? How much trouble could I get into by owning this purse?
Probably none as long as you don’t try to take it through a customs station. Fakes are copyright and trademark infringement and are illegal to produce and sell. In essence, it’s stealing from the ligitimate manufacturer (sort of like the current music download furor). I would suspect that you could be charged with possession of stolen property.
You won’t, unless it has the Louis Vuitton brand or trademarked logos, in which case you could conceivably be sued. The seller and producer of the handbag can get in lotsa trouble though.
It has the little LV’s all over it. The pattern is the same as on the real one I own and it says Louis Vuitton on the label.
The woman’s website has all sorts of disclaimers saying that she is not representing her bags as real. She says that they are 99.9% replicas.
They’re 0.1% authentic?
Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but one cannot copyright clothing, correct? That’s why so many seamstresses online will make movie replica costumes.
But the logos are trademarks, which means its illegal to copy those. If there were no words or logos on it, that would be different (which is why they put the logos all over it in the first place)
Sure you can. Design patents.
Customs never stopped me while wearing my old $14 “imitation” Rolex.
It’s actually such a nice, subdued looking watch that maybe one of these days I’ll get a real one. Honestly, I’m too embarrassed to wear the fake one.
I now can’t resist the impulse to trot out once more one of my favourite quotes from Neal Stephenson’s In the beginning was the command line
“The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts–the only medium–that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media (the richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn’t really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners).”
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