Apple goes to court over fakes

HI-TECH giant Apple says it has been buying chargers and cables labelled as genuine Apple products on Amazon.com and found that nearly 90 percent of them were counterfeit.

The revelation comes in a federal lawsuit filed by Apple against a New Jersey company. Mobile Star is accused of imprinting Apple logos on cables and chargers that “pose a significant risk of overheating, . re and electric shock.”

The chargers and cables were being sold on Amazon as genuine Apple products. Apple told the online retailer that they were fake. Amazon then identified Mobile Star as the source. Amazon is not named in the suit.

Mainland e-commerce giant Alibaba (阿里巴巴集團) founder Jack Ma (馬雲), meanwhile, created a controversy with his remarks on fake goods. He said China’s unbranded goods are often better than the branded originals they imitate.

“The problem is that the fake products today, they make better quality, better price than the real product, than the real names,” he said. “They’re the exact factories, the exact raw materials, but they do not use that name,” he said.

Alibaba has come under fire for the ease at which knock-off goods are available to consumers on its online Taobao (淘寶網) marketplace. Ma vowed to combat the problem of counterfeits, but admitted that “we cannot solve the problem 100 percent, because it’s .ghting against human instinct.”

(This article is published on Junior Standard on 26 October 2016)

Counterfeits often better quality, says Alibaba’s Jack Ma
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