Reprints vs. Counterfeits - Is there a difference?

[steve B]

Originally Posted by JustinD

I hate to victim blame on this, but much of the counterfeiting falls on the current trademark holders (Topps, Panini, NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, etc) for their lack of prosecution or civil damage claims against those doing this. EBay goes after those fakes basically only for those that hold them liable as well as providing those companies with contact info to the sellers for legal and civil consequence.

As long as they continue to ignore this, eBay will as well. There are zero consequences other than "possible" removal of a listing.

Unless the country makes some drastic changes, it will always be this way. For a rights holder, it's a balance of a number of factors. Chasing everyone that made a fake card would be expensive.

For sake of argument, lets say someone makes 15 reprints of popular Topps cards and sell them as reprints. Have I violated copyright? Yes. If I sold them for a total of even $300, how much have they damaged Topps, who don't sell their older cards, and claims right on the current packaging that they don't guarantee the cards will have any future value? Maybe the 300? Maybe more, maybe some unknown amount because it hurts their reputation. If the person doing that doesn't have much money, Topps is stuck with the cost of suing them, and having to do other stuff to eventually get the money. Probably way more than $300.


What could they lose? What did Disney lose back when they went after even people who made their own mouse T shirts and dared wear them to the park. A bit of public respect, which eventually costs them sales.


Protecting IP is important, but protecting it reasonably and cost effectively is also important.


In other fields it's getting more complex, early video games are avidly collected, and a lot of people make playable versions available online. It's sort of grassroots archiving, but it's also a copyright violation. One of the big sites just had most of the games taken down. The end result is that a lot of historic stuff is endangered, as it was issued on corruptible media. It doesn't have enough commercial value for a company to save it and periodically offer a version, but they want to protect it from piracy. Some also aren't at all willing to license the IP at all.

So there's areas where the laws need to get more restrictive, and areas where being less restrictive would be good.

Even then, simply reducing the copyright time on software wouldn't be fair, as that would put stuff like most of Microsoft Office in the same category with whatever's on an Atari 2600 cartridge from a company that folded in the mid 80's.