Um, being on a retail shelf is not the same as open-source. Try selling bootleg DVDs and let me know how that goes.
Hey, that baby had it coming!
Well, yah, but that’s beside the point.
Funny thing, even Simon has “copied” other flashlights. Not everything he sells is his own design. Like the aforementioned C8. He is the perfect example of somebody making the “copy” better than the “original” though. Or at least I think so. I will gladly buy from him if I see something in his store that I like, even if it is a “clone” and not his original design. Sofirn too. They have made some originals, but not all of their lights are their own design. Still, I will buy from them. I trust them to make good quality lights and sell them at a reasonable price.
True, they are not the same, but public is the same as public anyway. Once the design is “public” I don’t have any problem with anybody copying the look of the product. In fact, if it is a popular design, I want it to be successfully copied.
Okay. Enough. Reported.
This is going to end well,
just as the OP intended.
True Dat
This was what I was referring to. Not a clone, just a bit of “it works, let’s use it”
Iffn it was blue/green, azure, algae, cyan, cerulean it could have worked.
Butt no , it is a copy.
C’mon, everyone, just chillax.
Here, have a nice musical interlude before posting anything else…
oh yeah. calmed my ass!
Wrong. It is indeed a sort of club, but it’s for all members that continue to follow the rules that they agreed to when signing up for an account here. I would prefer to think of it as a “nice people’s club”.
Wrong. Fighting and politics and controversies are not allowed, and nobody is allowed to continue as a member if they insist on being rude, whether they are new or old. I have enforced this rule many times in the past by banning “old” members. And as in the case of this thread, action is also taken against new members.
I’ll continue to leave this thread open for a little longer with the expectation that nobody else will try to exploit it as an opportunity for rudeness.
How much extra are you willing to pay for the original? 1? 10? This is actually a fascinating question to me, I may open a poll.
That whole incident was a dark day for BLF as far as I’m concerned. Manker made a big effort to participate in the community, going as far as donating $1400 in sales revenue to Old-Lumens. The community turned around and didn’t just welcome their flashlights being cloned, but ran a group buy and told them it was their own fault for having “discriminatory pricing” because they required their dealers to follow MAPs.
Yep, no disagreement here.
I get it, how sneaky it was, but still, it was almost comical how blatant and in-your-face the copying was. And probably why I’ll never have a UT light…
(Not even UT-branded Sofirn lights, even with their blessing.)
I voted in your poll. :partying_face:
The poll has 54 reads and 4 votes. I am concerned a certain demographic is not representing itself.
Not sure I ever remember BLF ripping someone off and having it cloned in China.
Seems like quite a bit of innovation comes out of the BLF community, and is in the most part shared at little or no cost.
Copying is bad, but what’s copying?
All tail switches are copies of the very first one?
All triple color lights are illegal copies of the first one?
Intellectual Property (IP) can be patented to protect it, although China does tend to ignore IP. It gives some protection for novel ideas. Otherwise why spend time being creative, when everyone then copies you, and you end up wasting your investment.
As for designs, well a design is a design. Watch makers all copy each others designs with minor changes, so why not the same for torches? Generally in business, companies copy any good ideas as the starting point for their own products, that’s how it works. What differentiates them is how well they execute the product. Apple are known for taking time to work out the details, to get it right, others copy Apple, but they don’t put in so much effort and the result might look like an Apple product, but it’s inferior.
On the one hand, plagiarism is a terrible thing to do. On the other hand, virtually all progress is done by building on the work of others — standing on the shoulders of giants. People take an existing thing, improve on it, and then there’s a better thing.
So it’s complicated and nuanced, and nothing as simple as a “yes” or “no” can really do the topic justice.
The way I see it, some of the important factors are:
- Power. The cook at McDonald’s is held to different standards than the state governor. Or as Spiderman put it, with great power comes great responsibility. More influence means being more restricted in one’s actions, because those actions have a bigger effect. So it’s extra important to be careful, courteous, respectful, and generally make sure those actions are positive. Conversely, less power means less responsibility and more individual agency.
- Sentience. More sentient means more rights… like, a tree has fewer rights and protections than your 3rd-grade math teacher. On the far end of the spectrum, inanimate objects have virtually no rights. Plants are somewhat more protected, but only a little. Animals have more rights than plants. Children have more rights than animals. Adults have more rights than children. And presumably, post-human or super-human beings would have more rights than humans.
- Behavior. Good and positive behavior provides more rights and protections, while bad or harmful behavior tends to forfeit rights and protections. We treat saints differently than criminals, and treat companies differently based on how much they’re enriching the world versus draining resources from others.
- Degree of similarity. Blatant ripoffs are typically pretty rude, but taking a design and improving on it is often beneficial. Add some value, don’t just make exact copies.
So, an individual or a small company would be pretty high on the “rights” scale, and pretty low on the “responsibilities” scale. They are generally to be protected. Small companies tend to behave quite intelligently and can be reasoned with. If you want a clone of a small-company light, just ask the company if they’d be willing to make it or maybe collaborate with you.
But a large company with lots of power is much lower on the “rights” scale, and much higher on the “responsibilities” scale. They are held to higher standards, and not generally protected. The bigger the company, the less it can be reasoned with. They grow toward money in the same way that trees grow toward sunlight. It’s not generally a conscious decision as much as a matter of automatic instinctual behavior.
So a small company cloning a large company’s product is typically not so bad, especially when the larger company has already refused to listen to the people and do what the people want. The tree’s roots are being ignored, so they can be justified in getting together to start a new tree.
However, when a big company actually behaves well and ignores the money-colored “sunlight” in favor of maintaining a positive relationship with its root community, the big company still acts more like a small company and thus can expect better treatment than other large companies.
Then on top of all this is the degree of similarity. The more similar to the original, the less justified a clone is. And the more unique the clone is, the less justification it needs.
I hope this is making sense.
The idea is that there are some complex factors which are all along different scales, and these things combine to determine how good or bad it is when someone copies someone else’s design. There are at least four independent variables mentioned here… Power, sentience, behavior, and how much is changed during the copying process. … and that’s not even a complete list.
Basically, when the big fish does it to the little fish, it’s usually not okay. But when the little fish does it to the big fish, sometimes it’s okay or even positive… especially if the new design improves on the old one. But it really depends on the details.