Week 6 EOC: Illicit Trade

Knockoffs are everywhere. You almost can't avoid it. Whether you are at a shopping center or shopping online, everything from hand bangs to watches to shoes, you can find some form of knockoff.  For a lot of these products they aren't covered under copyrights and companies don't hold patents on them due to the expense of it as well as originality.  The people selling these fake versions of these products sell them at a fraction of the price of the real deal.  Even though they aren't the real thing, it is still in high demand.  Everyone wants to be seen with the best things and unless someone is really good at spotting fakes, no one would know and the general public would have a different opinion of you just.  If people who could financially afford the real deal were buying the knockoffs just because it was cheaper, now you are hurting the bottom line of the manufacturers of the real thing.  it could also hurt the company’s reputation if the fakes started to make the company look bad with bad products that don’t last or are of poor quality.  On top of hurting the reputation of the company, it affects the company financially.  Yes it is unethical and unmoral but these people who sell the knockoffs don’t care.  They do it for the money.  It is something that countries from all over the world are trying to fight but it is almost a losing battle as it has created a lot of jobs in manufacturing these fake products.  So if you take away the knockoff companies, then you take away all of those jobs and the unemployment rate around the world goes up which could create all sorts of issues in other areas of crime.  How do we try to deal with this?  Well, we can keep trying to fight and take down storefronts with raids but as long as the manufacturing is still going on, the products will still find a way into the market.