[raven1231]

Originally Posted by gramicci101

That doesn't work. The market votes with their wallet, so they'll always go for the cheapest option. This encourages companies that actually do the R&D to just not participate anymore. What's the point of devoting six months to a year or more and tying up multiple people's time with designing, fabricating, testing, more designing, more fabricating, more testing, etc... if you won't be able to recoup those expenses?


All it takes is one shitty company to buy one kit legitimately, copy it, and start selling copies of your kit for a thousand or two less, and there goes any profit you might have made. There are several countries in Asia that excel at making cheap knockoffs of nearly everything, and there's no way to force them to stop. The market will gravitate towards those kits unless there's something horrendously wrong with them, just because they're cheaper.

It does work in the sense that if that actually happened and everyone just started buying nothing but copies (I doubt this would ever occur for the same reason people don't all buy Rotas, or ebay exhausts), then there would be nothing to copy. Eventually it would get to the point where someone had to RD a new kit and people would buy the authentic kit. Now that might get copied down the road as well and eventually the cycle would restart itself perhaps but in reality I don't think this scenario would ever occur as some people only by "authentic" name brand products.