Copyrights and Trademarks? Bah, Humbug!

Walk along the most transited boulevards of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and you can openly buy DVDs of movies still in the theaters, as well as music cds, for as little as 2 US dollars a piece. In Colombia, shops in popular malls will offer you shoddy looking Nike shoes, which are clearly not the real item, while street hawkers offer you poorly printed knockoffs of the latest bestselling books. In Mauritius, Disney ice cream vending trucks roam the beach parking lots. They are festooned with fairly good renditions of a wide variety of Disney cartoon characters and the company's logo as well. Too bad the overpriced ice cream they sell is awful! Buy a cheap computer assembled by a small shop virtually anywhere in the developing world (and even some first world countries) and it likely runs a pirated older version of Windows. Unauthorized Hello Kitty images appear on a huge variety of products in Mexican shops. These are just a few examples of a multi-billion dollar worldwide business based on ripping-off the legitimate creations of others.

Local governments do little or nothing to stop the practice, while those who buy the products might not know they are illegal, but even when they do, they seldom care. Often, there is no other option than the pirated one, especially in the case of rental videos. By not protecting intellectual property rights, such countries discourage foreign investment and help perpetuate the crushing poverty that afflicts large segments of their societies. For now, you are likely to see a police officer browsing through pirated videos at a street stall in Bangkok, looking to buy the latest Toy Story movie for his kids.

If you ever think of buying knockoff, be prepared for the possibility that they might not only be of very poor quality and workmanship, but might also be unsafe, since they were fabricated in unregulated sweat shops.

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