China Is Stealing Your Kickstarter Ideas

[HardOCP News]

You know that brilliant idea you had that you are trying to get funded on Kickstarter? Don't bother, China has ripped off your idea and is already selling it online. The best part? Your Kickstarter backers will turn on YOU, not the scumbags knocking off your product.

Sherman had become a victim of China’s lightning-fast copycats. Before he had even found a factory to make his new product, manufacturers in China had spied his idea online, and beaten him to the punch. When his Kickstarter backers caught on, they were furious. “You are charging double the price for what the copycats are charging, yet I seriously doubt the final product will be any better than the copycats,” one person commented.

 

[heatlesssun]

Great artists steal.

 

[Nobified[H]]

You know that brilliant idea you had that you are trying to get funded on Kickstarter? Don't bother, China has ripped off your idea and is already selling it online. The best part? Your Kickstarter backers will turn on YOU, not the scumbags knocking off your product.

Sherman had become a victim of China’s lightning-fast copycats. Before he had even found a factory to make his new product, manufacturers in China had spied his idea online, and beaten him to the punch. When his Kickstarter backers caught on, they were furious. “You are charging double the price for what the copycats are charging, yet I seriously doubt the final product will be any better than the copycats,” one person commented.

Just disconnect China from the internet!

 

[shansoft]

Great artists steal.

I see what you did there.... 

 

[modi123]

Damn.. that's harsh.

Startups and foreign manufacturers are embracing a new reality—someone in China is going to make a knockoff of your unique invention, almost immediately. All any company or entrepreneur can do is prepare for it

 

[cageymaru]

Should have never sent our manufacturing sector to China in the 1980's. What's done is done. The cat is out of the bag and you can't put it back.

With that said, it's kinda cool that Chinese factories are borrowing ideas and selling better quality items on Alibaba. Thinking of ordering one of those 61 key mechanical keyboards. Would buy the designed in America version, but hell the design was sent to China to get manufactured; might as well cut out the middle man and order straight from the factory.

 

[modi123]

Except that, like the hoverboard crazy over last christmas, knock off companies are hard to get a hold of when a battery explodes, catches fire, etc.. where a US company has some obligation and recourse routes.

 

[cageymaru]

Except that, like the hoverboard crazy over last christmas, knock off companies are hard to get a hold of when a battery explodes, catches fire, etc.. where a US company has some obligation and recourse routes.

The Chinese version of something is sometimes 50% less. Unless it's a craze item like the hoverboards like you mentioned.

 

[pxc]

I think Planet Money had a podcast about that last year.

 

[Xrave]

Welcome to life.

Raising capital caries its own risk of revealing your idea to everyone. Deal with it.

 

[Wolf_Tech]

Welcome to kickstarter, and the internet. I have a few products Im workin on. No internet no pictures no nothing I'm getting a patent first.

 

[Grahamkracka]

Welcome to kickstarter, and the internet. I have a few products Im workin on. No internet no pictures no nothing I'm getting a patent first.

If you read the article it points out that it's basically pointless to do so. As soon as it gets sent to a manufacturer or parts supplier you are boned as it's nearly impossible to enforce the patent.

 

[Chapeau]

This is so true... but its still a choice that the consumer can make. Chinese consumers in particular are savy to buying the original product over cheap copies because there is real value in QC and support...

Here in Australia we get a lot of pressure from Chinese goods but they still can't compete despite having amazing prices. Afterall who wants to potentially lose their house over a cheap fan to save 40 dollars?

 

[Vercinaigh]

Welcome to kickstarter, and the internet. I have a few products Im workin on. No internet no pictures no nothing I'm getting a patent first.

China literally couldn't care any less about your patent.

 

[Tak Ne]

And here I was thinking "OMG this is great. If I need something I create a Kickstarter project, wait for someone to rip it off then buy it cheap without having to do all the R&D and design...."

But... Its been over 3 years and I still dont see my Death Star on AliExpress.

 

[sfsuphysics]

Have a Kickstarter where you literally show everyone your invention, and don't apply for patents on it, I'm quite honestly surprised this hasn't happened sooner like day 1 Kickstarter happened.

This is literally as stupid as going to venture capitalists and showing them how your invention works without getting them to sign a non-disclosure, non-compete, non-whatever so they can't turn around and your steal your shit.

 

[ChoGGi]

And here I was thinking "OMG this is great. If I need something I create a Kickstarter project, wait for someone to rip it off then buy it cheap without having to do all the R&D and design...."

But... Its been over 3 years and I still dont see my Death Star on AliExpress.

Oh they made it, but it's aliexpress you gotta look for the cheap chinese knockoffs, or the really cheap ones

 

[Tweak42]

Capitalism at it's finest or economic warfare depending how you look at it.
In the evolution of things, it's a double edge sword. Keeps companies from totally charging whatever they want for copyrighted designs, but the downside is it can literally steal money invested on R&D before an inventor can recoup loses.

 

[dgz]

Great artists steal.

While the not so great ones call for thermonuclear retaliation when others do it to them.

Stealing is survival. Stealing is progress. Not sharing is not only evil but incredibly dumb in the long run.

 

[Darunion]

china copying things and selling it cheaper? Say it isn't so!! I can't possibly believe this hogwash!

 

[meanmodda[H]]

If it's using cheap or easy to produce parts i'ts going to be copied , you can count on it. Build something that is low volume and uses expensive components or relies on software updates and consumables.

 

[Prisoner849]

The people we are taking advantage of are taking advantage of us. Comedy gold and karma's a bitch. Too bad it's an individual that is getting reamed though; I only wish it were a jPhone.

 

[Krab]

The only thing that bothers me about this is that they get to play by a different set of rules. As soon as we see more original chinese products(lol) they will be vigorously defended in our courts. They get to steal our ideas and our technology and we get nothing other than the opportunity to buy the poorly made end product.

 

[Tweak42]

The only thing that bothers me about this is that they get to play by a different set of rules. As soon as we see more original chinese products(lol) they will be vigorously defended in our courts. They get to steal our ideas and our technology and we get nothing other than the opportunity to buy the poorly made end product.

Actually I argue we also get to buy the high quality end products as well (for higher prices). There's a ton of goods made in China that is well made now, sadly often at a cheaper manufacturing cost than if made here in the USA. It's not sustainable though, their rising living standards and cost of living will eventually close the economic advantage in a generation; the same trend happened in post war Japan making cheap goods to sell to the USA. What remains is where the next country will be for cheap manufacturing labor or if robots will just replace all labor period. [que skynet music]

 

[daglesj]

Should have never sent our manufacturing sector to China in the 1980's. What's done is done. The cat is out of the bag and you can't put it back.

With that said, it's kinda cool that Chinese factories are borrowing ideas and selling better quality items on Alibaba. Thinking of ordering one of those 61 key mechanical keyboards. Would buy the designed in America version, but hell the design was sent to China to get manufactured; might as well cut out the middle man and order straight from the factory.

My other half does this when she can. She saw a goose down winter duvet a few months ago for £250 in a shop. She looked for the makers address on the box then looked that up, bit more info digging found that was a distributor, not the actual manufacturer of the duvet.

Even more digging found it was made just 4 miles away from us! Call to the company secured the same duvet for £75.00. Half an hours effort saved a lot of money.

 

[c3k]

China's blatant disregard of intellectual property rights will continue until there is some sort of consequence. A very reasonable response would be a one month "all inbound products get inspected". This means, each ship/aircraft that comes in from China has EVERY ITEM impounded and EVERY ITEM inspected. Got 10,000 Hug Me Elmo dolls? Okay, all 10,000 get inspected. Every item gets checked for copyright infringement. How do you do this? Check with the copyright owner...for EVERY ITEM.

Would that cause a disruption? Hell yeah. Once China starts complying with international norms of trade, they can start reaping the benefit. Right now, they get all the benefits and have none of the burdens.

(FWIW, the SAME factories produce the "off market" products. You contract with a specific factory to produce 500 widgets a week. They do. They make what you want, how you want it, for the price you want, and the quantity you specify. It only takes them, say, 25 hours a week to make 500 widgets. The other 15 hours of the week, they STILL make the widget...but sell them to another distributor. You have no cause to complain: they've done what you've asked. They're just "capitalizing" on the opportunity. Their view. Of course, this is a totally spurious example: who believes the Chinese operate on a 40 week?)

This is not an embargo or a trade war. It is an inspection regime. Japan does this for every US automobile imported. Each and every one gets inspected, individually. There is no "sampling methodology". If your country does not enforce international law, then your products need to be inspected to ensure compliance.

 

[Reimu]

Should have never sent our manufacturing sector to China in the 1980's. What's done is done. The cat is out of the bag and you can't put it back.

With that said, it's kinda cool that Chinese factories are borrowing ideas and selling better quality items on Alibaba. Thinking of ordering one of those 61 key mechanical keyboards. Would buy the designed in America version, but hell the design was sent to China to get manufactured; might as well cut out the middle man and order straight from the factory.

China's blatant disregard of intellectual property rights will continue until there is some sort of consequence. A very reasonable response would be a one month "all inbound products get inspected". This means, each ship/aircraft that comes in from China has EVERY ITEM impounded and EVERY ITEM inspected. Got 10,000 Hug Me Elmo dolls? Okay, all 10,000 get inspected. Every item gets checked for copyright infringement. How do you do this? Check with the copyright owner...for EVERY ITEM.

Would that cause a disruption? Hell yeah. Once China starts complying with international norms of trade, they can start reaping the benefit. Right now, they get all the benefits and have none of the burdens.

(FWIW, the SAME factories produce the "off market" products. You contract with a specific factory to produce 500 widgets a week. They do. They make what you want, how you want it, for the price you want, and the quantity you specify. It only takes them, say, 25 hours a week to make 500 widgets. The other 15 hours of the week, they STILL make the widget...but sell them to another distributor. You have no cause to complain: they've done what you've asked. They're just "capitalizing" on the opportunity. Their view. Of course, this is a totally spurious example: who believes the Chinese operate on a 40 week?)

This is not an embargo or a trade war. It is an inspection regime. Japan does this for every US automobile imported. Each and every one gets inspected, individually. There is no "sampling methodology". If your country does not enforce international law, then your products need to be inspected to ensure compliance.

Mere's the problem I got right now.

1. Chinese copycat products don't actually 'sell' in the US as in that they are imported items that are supposedly only circulated domestically, even if they are acquired on Ali Express. In short, the onus is completely on the buyer who's going through a 3rd party service to import products into USA. Therefore, you can't enforce a strict inspection regime on them. Xiaomi for one doesn't sell any phone into the US, but people are still importing these on their own volition.
2. I think that you need to look to Bush and Clinton era's push to get China admitted into WTO as well. Prior to that point, the Chinese enabler was largely the Taiwanese who leveraged the cheap labor resources when Deng Xiaoping began to open China up. What is more worrying than "China stole our manufacturing jobs" (which already went to Taiwan in the 70s, then Vietnam/Malaysia/Indonesia etc) is that Americans and the west at large are failing to get to the Chinese domestic end consumer market.

Actually I argue we also get to buy the high quality end products as well (for higher prices). There's a ton of goods made in China that is well made now, sadly often at a cheaper manufacturing cost than if made here in the USA. It's not sustainable though, their rising living standards and cost of living will eventually close the economic advantage in a generation; the same trend happened in post war Japan making cheap goods to sell to the USA. What remains is where the next country will be for cheap manufacturing labor or if robots will just replace all labor period. [que skynet music]

3. There's twofold issues right now. One being that Chinese domestic market has proven to be inadequate to support its own growth, to the point that China's been stagnating since 2011 in light of the global trade slowdown. The second issue is that Chinese wealth is concentrated along the coastal provinces and attempt to reach out to the remaining 800 million by interior development is about to hit a massive slag, for the Chinese already have about 4 trillion dollars worth of toxic debt from the unrestricted spending spree of 2000-2011.

 

[cageymaru]

China's blatant disregard of intellectual property rights will continue until there is some sort of consequence. A very reasonable response would be a one month "all inbound products get inspected". This means, each ship/aircraft that comes in from China has EVERY ITEM impounded and EVERY ITEM inspected. Got 10,000 Hug Me Elmo dolls? Okay, all 10,000 get inspected. Every item gets checked for copyright infringement. How do you do this? Check with the copyright owner...for EVERY ITEM.

Would that cause a disruption? Hell yeah. Once China starts complying with international norms of trade, they can start reaping the benefit. Right now, they get all the benefits and have none of the burdens.

(FWIW, the SAME factories produce the "off market" products. You contract with a specific factory to produce 500 widgets a week. They do. They make what you want, how you want it, for the price you want, and the quantity you specify. It only takes them, say, 25 hours a week to make 500 widgets. The other 15 hours of the week, they STILL make the widget...but sell them to another distributor. You have no cause to complain: they've done what you've asked. They're just "capitalizing" on the opportunity. Their view. Of course, this is a totally spurious example: who believes the Chinese operate on a 40 week?)

This is not an embargo or a trade war. It is an inspection regime. Japan does this for every US automobile imported. Each and every one gets inspected, individually. There is no "sampling methodology". If your country does not enforce international law, then your products need to be inspected to ensure compliance.

What you just described would run Amazon, Wal Mart, Target, Kmart, Sears, etc out of business. There is no fast way to inspect items. That month's worth of goods would be trapped in import hell.

Also you do realize that we sell cars and other goods to China. Imagine if their response was to shut down the parts for the American auto industry. Block all trade for 6 months. They know how to build our vehicles already as they have service centers over there. We send them the full schematics for every item that has a China logo on it. They can just switch to making our goods for free.

Lastly you have to remember that they own many of the rare metal deposits in the world. Good luck getting enough rare metals to manufacture the latest iPhone even if you convinced them to stop making knockoffs. All that cheap Chinese steel going into buildings? It has to come from somewhere. Capitalism dictates that you buy low and sell high. Trying to tell American builders to not buy the cheapest steel on the planet is empty rhetoric.


People always lament change and how we need to go back to the good ol' days. But I notice that most people don't want to give up their college education and mine coal. I've yet to meet an architect that wants to give up his business to work in a sweatshop factory screwing the 45th screw into the base of the antennae on an iPhone over and over for 8 hours a day. Heck you would be hard pressed to find a fast food worker that wants to hop into assembly line work in the same manner that Foxconn does it. Those Chinese workers have it so bad that Foxconn had to install anti suicide nets on their roofs! How many people want to leave the city life and grow vegetables on a farm for $2 an hour like an immigrant? Just musings; please don't get mad.


In the 1980's we made the choice as a nation to forgo the manufacturing of goods to pursue careers in design. I was told over and over by government officials, school teachers, clergy, the nightly news, etc that this was the way to go for our country to prosper. I remember companies like JP Stevens having to go out of business because they couldn't compete with China prices. People blamed it on the Unions trying to raise the price of employee wages, but the truth was that there was no way for them to pay their employees a living wage in America, and compete with foreign pricing. Can't have your workers living in cardboard boxes in America like they do in Brazilian favelas. I remember the resentment that people felt when textile jobs were first sent to Jamaica / Haiti and the surrounding areas. Then business leaders discovered that Asian countries had even cheaper sweatshop labor and little to no rules. I was mesmerized that Valve could manufacture the Steam Controller here until I saw the entire assembly line was automated by robots. That's the only way to compete with sweatshop labor.

Those were the choices that we made back then. The crazy thing that I kept hearing over and over from influential people, was that countries like China had workers so uneducated that there was no way in God's green earth that they could copy our designs and run us out of business. All they were good at was screwing bolt A into hole B. Americans would always have the upper hand because we were educated and they were not. I look on TV 20 years later and I see them flying Chinese made 747 knockoffs. I see warplanes that sure look like they kick ass. Don't they have destroyers and other naval ships? Less than a decade before I was born, they were dabbling with nuclear weapons and look at them now. I always wondered as a child that if they were smart enough to make a nuclear warhead then why couldn't they just take our designs and sell them for their own? But I was told that they were a stupid people so don't worry.

As Reimu pointed out Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, and others did the same somewhat earlier. I never saw their items on the shelf in the same capacity as the Chinese products when they joined as a major importer for the USA. Japan was regarded as high quality goods when I was born, even though my parents said that their stuff was crap shortly after World War II. Later when the Beta vs VHS battle was waging, we viewed Japanese products as the pinnacle of engineering for foreign goods. That reverence for their goods is reflected in the quality of products from Sony. More expensive but worth it. As a child of the early 70's, I try to relay what I saw as a child growing up.

Also Chinese knockoffs do sell here on shelves. It is called Amazon and other Etailers. All you need to do is look for the cool item that you wanted from Best Buy, but was priced a little higher than you thought it should have been. Go to Amazon and find it. Look at other sellers. You will find all the Chinese knockoffs that your heart desires. Report them for selling knockoffs. Bob Wang's account will get shut down and Billy Wang will have a new account within 30 minutes selling the same knockoff. Multiply that by say 50. That's why this is an exercise in futility policing it at the retail level. Some searching can be done when the containers show up at our shores, but it takes too long. You need diplomatic means of policing it before it leaves China.

I don't think I have much more to say. We let the cat out the bag and this was our choice.