“Customers at an Apple Store in the Chinese city of Kunming berated staff and demanded refunds on Friday after the shop was revealed to be an elaborate fake, sparking a media and Internet frenzy,” Melanie Lee reports for Reuters.
“Long a target of counterfeiters and unauthorized resellers, Apple Inc was alerted to the near flawless fake shop by an American blogger living in the southwestern city, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest genuine Apple stores in Beijing and Shanghai,” Lee reports. “Staff were also angry at the unwanted attention after more than 1,000 media outlets picked up the story and pictures of the store from the BirdAbroad blog. ‘The media is painting us to be a fake store but we don’t sell fakes, all our products are real, you can check it yourself,’ said one employee, who didn’t want to give his name. ‘There is no Chinese law that says I can’t decorate my shop the way I want to decorate it.'”
MacDailyNews Take: In general, it seems that the concept of intellectual property is completely foreign in China and, in fact, much of Asia. Look at Samsung. We can easily imagine Samsung saying: “There’s no law that says we can’t decorate our phones and tablets the way we want.” Trade dress infringement is trade dress infringement. We’re not sure that these leeches even understand why it’s wrong, regardless of whatever local laws are on the books.
Lee reports, “The fake Apple Store is situated along a crowded pedestrian-only shopping street, its black Apple logo gleaming. Inside, with its Apple posters on the walls and iPads and Macbook computers displayed on wooden tables, the store looks every bit like Apple Stores found all over the world but for some slightly shoddy workmanship and one or two errant details.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related article:
Multiple fake ‘Apple Stores’ in China even fake out employees – July 20, 2011