Trademarks and obious knock-offs

[Mister_Rik]

@CookingWithGas

There are lots of store brand products that use packaging similar in style and colors to a name brand product that they want to imitate. I do not think they are trying to make anyone think that their store brand is actually the name brand, but they are trying to obviously signal, “Hey this laundry detergent cheery red bottle is exactly the same color as Tide so it is also exactly the same quality and a lot cheaper!” In OTC drugs the store brand package often goes far as to say “Allergy Medicine–Compare to Claritin”.

I am not sure how they stay on this side of trademark infringement but this is a very common practice in U.S. grocery stores and pharmacies.

I find it somewhat amusing that the plastic shrink-wrap safety seal around the caps on bottles of Nyquil are printed with “Vicks does not manufacture store brands.” And another thing with Nyquil - it would appear that Vicks didn’t trademark the distinctive triangular shape of the bottle, since all the store-brand knockoffs copy it. I know that Coca-Cola has a trademark on the distinctive shape of their bottle.

[seal_cleaner]

@Chronos

In the US, it’s a trademark violation if they’re competing in the same market and there’s a reasonable possibility of confusion, and the trademark owner can sue over it. How close a name, logo, or whatever can get before there’s a “reasonable possibility of confusion” is, of course, a matter for the courts to decide.

Note, by the way, that one condition of holding a trademark is that you have to defend it. This is why, for instance, you’ll hear of Disney sending cease-and-desist letters to daycares with Disney characters painted on the walls: They’re defending their trademark. If they didn’t, then the trademark would lapse.

My dad worked for CBS when they held the Peanuts copyright. A woman asked him if she could use Snoopy for hand-drawn posters advertising a school fair. He answered “We need to pretend you never asked me.”

[Chronos]

Quoth Dinsdale:

I’ve only been to Aldi (discount grocery) a couple of times, but when I went I was surprised at how many knock offs that had in packaging similar to the original.

You think so? In my experience, most Aldi packaging just looks like Aldi packaging. I mean, their knockoff of Honey Nut Cheerios is in an orange box and so on, but what color are you going to make the box for a honey cereal? And if nothing else, the bar codes all over the place make Aldi products pretty distinctive (they put a bar code on every surface of a package to make it quicker for the cashiers).

[watchwolf49]

McDowell’s has Golden Arcs …

[septimus]

There are a variety of types of knock-offs in Thailand. The fake Rolex watches and Gucci purses are aimed just at tourists, but residents have to be wary also. As Shakester points out, the clone brand may have a name similar to the prestige brand — these goods may be decent products in their own right. Buy a cell-phone from a disreputable stand and the good parts inside may have been stripped out and replaced with inferior goods. For a while I was confused about the flash-drives I was buying from small stores in rural Thailand — they’re supposed to be very reliable but the ones I bought failed quickly. (E-mail with Kingston told me how to distinguish the fakes.) It’s not unheard of to be ripped off at bars and restaurants, so Thais tend to be, correctly, dependent on friends’ recommendations.

But most stores are relatively honest about their products. I recall buying a small appliance from our nearby small town. She showed me two cartons, very similar but with very different prices. The only obvious difference (beyond the extra letters in the brandname) between the International-brand carton and the National-brand carton, was in the colored picture of the rice-cooker inside. The former’s picture was obviously a copy of the latter’s but had a severe moiré problem!

[Asuka]

@septimus

There are a variety of types of knock-offs in Thailand. The fake Rolex watches and Gucci purses are aimed just at tourists, but residents have to be wary also. As Shakester points out, the clone brand may have a name similar to the prestige brand — these goods may be decent products in their own right. Buy a cell-phone from a disreputable stand and the good parts inside may have been stripped out and replaced with inferior goods. For a while I was confused about the flash-drives I was buying from small stores in rural Thailand — they’re supposed to be very reliable but the ones I bought failed quickly. (E-mail with Kingston told me how to distinguish the fakes.) It’s not unheard of to be ripped off at bars and restaurants, so Thais tend to be, correctly, dependent on friends’ recommendations.

Knock-off flash drives are very interesting for the fact the cheapest ones will claim to be 16GB of storage or so and your PC will confirm that, but then you put stuff onto it and turns out you can only put 512MB of files on it before it gives you an error saying it’s full.

Sometimes you get the ones where you can actually put unlimited stuff on it, as in you can actually exceed the amount of storage listed on the package but of course the moment you take the flash drive out of your computer and reinsert it 90% of the files are wiped. I kind of wonder how they spoof the computer like that.