福布斯：亚马逊和易贝打开了中国假货的潘多拉魔盒，现在却不知所措 [美国媒体]

Amazon And Ebay Opened Pandora's Box Of Chinese Counterfeits And Now Don't Know What To Do

福布斯：亚马逊和易贝打开了中国假货的潘多拉魔盒，现在却不知所措



Counterfeit luxury goods are displayed by customs (L) and police (R) officials following a record seizure at the customs headquarters in Hong Kong. (PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

在HK海关总署获取证物之后，海关工作人员（左）和警察（右）正在展示缴获的奢侈品假货。

A few years ago in California, a professional cartoonist, a designer of golf putters, a surfer, and a self-professed geek got together and formed a company. No, this isn’t the start of a bad joke, it’s the very real story of four guys and one good idea — a story of grassroots entrepreneurship and the struggle of the little guy against the tides of global e-commerce.

几年前在加利福尼亚，一个职业漫画家、一个高尔夫球杆设计者、一个冲浪爱好者和一个自称极客的家伙走到了一起，组建了一家公司。不，这不是一个糟糕笑话的开始，这是关于四个家伙和一个非常棒的点子的真实故事——一个草根企业和一个小不点与全球电商的浪潮对抗的故事。

These four Californians who couldn’t have been more different bonded together over the simple fact that they were all dads who shared a similar struggle when bathing their babies. They decided that together they would solve this problem, and they set to work developing a specialized pillow that could be inserted into a sink or tub that would hold their babies in place. They called it the Blooming Bath.

这四个截然不同的加利福尼亚人走到一起的原因仅仅是他们都是孩子的父亲，在给孩子洗澡的过程中他们都碰到了类似的问题。他们决定一同解决这个问题，他们开发出了一种特别的枕头，能够被放入水槽或者浴缸当中，而从将他们的孩子固定在一个位置上。他们称之为花瓣浴。

They then patented the product, trademarked it, passed it through all of the required materials and safety tests, and eventually took it to market. Almost immediately, sales and major design awards began rolling in, and, for a moment, it appeared as if these four random dads from California had it made:

然后他们获得了这一产品的专利权，给它设计商标，让它通过了所有要求的原材料与安全测试，最终将它投入了市场。在很快的时间里，销售奖项和设计奖项都纷至沓来，一时间，这四个来自加利福尼亚的奶爸似乎已经获得了成功：

"When you can take a problem and solve it, that feels great. And when you can take a problem and solve it for a lot of other people, that feels even better. But when you can take a problem and turn the answer into something that's just so darn adorable - well, there's just no topping that."

"当你碰到一个问题，后果解决它的时候，感觉好极了。当你碰到一个问题，并且为其它很多人解决了这一问题时，那么感觉更好。但是当你碰到一个问题，却转而去抄袭别人的优秀答案，那么就不怎么好了"。

Perhaps unfortunately, Chinese counterfeiters also found the Blooming Bath adorable — so darn adorable, in fact, that they decided to copy it and sell it themselves on Amazon and Ebay.

可能不幸的是，中国的造假者们发现了花瓣浴很棒，它太棒了，所以他们决定抄袭它，并在亚马逊和易贝上自行出售这种商品。

“Unfortunately, the everyday workload of building and running a new business had us overlooking the very large problem of counterfeiters,” Tiffany Pond, the wife of one of the creators of the Blooming Bath explained to me. “These [counterfeits] have popped up by a half dozen different names by thousands of sellers, but all using our photos, designs, and trademarks to market their items. We have a store on Amazon and counterfeits have been able to attach themselves to our page, violating all of our intellectual property.”

"不幸的是，建立和运作一个新企业的日常工作重负已经让我们忽视了伪造者的严重问题"，花瓣浴的创建者之一的妻子Tiffany Pond向我解释称，"这些造假者以好几种不同的商品名称出现在数以千计的卖家手中，但是全都用的是我们的照片、设计和商标来出售他们的商品。我们在亚马逊上面开设了一个商店，而造假者们却能够自行链接到我们的页面上，侵犯了我们所有的知识产权"。

Now, the original creators of the Blooming Bath are watching their earnings slip and their reputation get dismantled by forces that are beyond their control. Not only are they losing sales but recipients of inferior-quality fake Blooming Baths are often not aware that they received a counterfeit, and mistakenly conclude that the legitimate product is junk — and often letting the world know about it via word of mouth and reviews.

现在，花瓣浴的创始者们目睹着在不受他们控制的力量影响下，他们的收入开始下滑，他们的信誉收到了损害。不仅是他们的营业额在减少，那些购买了劣质的假货的消费者们没有意识到他们买到了假货，所以错误地得出结论，认为合法的产品也是垃圾——并且经常通过悠悠众口和评论让全世界都知道这一点。

Like many others, the team behind the Blooming Bath discovered that the source of many of the counterfeits was China and Hong Kong — the origin of 60% of the world’s knock-offs, according to the OECD.

就像其他许多人一样，花瓣浴背后的团队发现了许多假货的源头是中国与HK——根据经济合作组织提供的数据，它是世界上百分之六十山寨货的源头。

“Why do citizens of China and Hong Kong find it permissible to fraudulently produce and sell anything they think they can get money for?” Pond asked me in exasperation. “They don't honor patents, trademarks, copyrights, or anything… Please, I would like to understand. Instead, I am just upset and angry at an entire population.”

Pond愤怒的问我："为什么中国和HK的公民认为欺诈性地制造和出售他们认为能够赚钱的任何东西是被许可的呢？他们不尊重专利、商标、版权或其他任何东西。我想知道为什么。现在我对他们所有人都感到生气和愤怒"。

Pond’s question was not rhetorical. She was expressing a sentiment that has become common among business owners and patent holders in countries like the USA, who are having their products knocked-off on major e-commerce platforms by foreign counterfeiters who seemingly operate with impunity.

Pond的问题不是夸张的。她表达了一种在像美国这样的国家中的企业所有者和专利持有者所普遍具有的情绪，他们的产品都在主要的电子商务平台上遭到了外国那些似乎可以不受惩罚的造假者的山寨。

But that doesn’t mean that we’re talking about bad people who are out to destroy the businesses of others when we talk about Chinese counterfeiters. Rather, we’re talking about a completely different manufacturing ecosystem that operates under a different set of rules than in the West. They exist in a world that is virtually devoid of IP restrictions, where anybody can pretty much take the designs of anybody else and reproduce them without a viable threat of repercussions. We’re talking about shanzhai, the grassroots, quasi-underground ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of manufacturers that extend across China. As I've previously covered:

但是这不意味着我们在讨论中国的造假者的时候就指的是那些想要毁灭别人的生意的坏人。相反，我们在讨论的是一个完全不同的制造业生态系统，它是按照与西方截然不同的一系列规则运行的。它们存在于一个几乎没有知识产权限制的世界当中，在那里，任何人都能将其他人的设计拿来用，可以在没有任何后果威胁的情况下复制它们。我们在说的就是"山寨"，一种由遍布中国的无数制造商组成的草根的、准地下的生态体系。正如我之前所报道过的：

Shanzhai literally means “mountain stronghold,” as in the hideout of bandits... In contemporary slang, the word shanzhai began being used to mean “to copy” or “to parody,” and just prior to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 it was applied to knock-off goods. Perhaps as a combination of these two meanings, the term shanzhai is now used for China’s massive copycat industry and the unique network of design and manufacturing that sprouted from it.

    山寨字面上的意思是"山中的堡垒"，被用处匪徒的藏身之处。在当代的俚语当中，山寨这个词被用于指"复制"和"模仿"，早在2008年北京奥运会之前，它就被用于称呼山寨商品。可能是作为这两个意义的结合，山寨这个词现在被用于称呼中国的大规模仿造工业和由它萌发出的设计和制造的独特网络。

Or, as put a little less lovingly by China-scholar Callum Smith on The China Story:

或者，正如研究中国的学者Callum Smith在《中国故事》当中讲到的：

    Shanzhai, the word means roughly ‘mass-produced imitation goods’, has created a Chinese landscape that is littered with products derided by the media, Chinese and international, as ‘copycat’, ‘guerrilla counterfeits’ and ‘knockoffs’, all the work of thieves.

    山寨这个词的大概意思是"大规模生产的仿造商品"，从而创造出了一副遭到中国和国际媒体嘲笑的中国图景，比如"抄袭者"、"游记造假者"和"山寨货"，所有这些剽窃而来的作品。

“Shanzhai started as a copycat. Forget about the respect for intellectual property,” David Li, the co-founder of China’s first makerspace, XinCheJian, told me in a previous interview. “So if someone does one a design, more often than not if it is useful it is going to get copied. The thing is, the whole system is cooperative, based on the concept of gongban, which roughly translates to a public bowl. Meaning, people want to share… So people are starting to share and that turns out to drive the whole industry to move so fast.”

中国首家创客空间的联合创始人大卫李在之前的一场采访中告诉我："山寨是作为一种抄袭现象出现的，忘掉知识产权之类的东西，所以，如果有人做了一个设计，当它是有用的时候，往往就会被抄袭。事情就是：整个体系都是基于"公办"的概念相互合作的，翻译过来大致就是公用的碗的意思。这意味着，人们想要分享。所以人们开始共享，然后转而让整个工业都如此快速地发展了起来"。

“The thing is, these guys were figuring out how to copy premium goods on a shoestring budget,” said Bunnie Huang, the renown hacker behind cult-classics like the Chumby and Novena. “That's the thing that people are missing about what these guys do. They're like 'Oh my God, that's a terrible iPhone' and then they're like 'Holy shit, he made an iPhone for like five hundred dollars and a ball of string.'”

隐藏在诸如Chumby和Novena等后面的着名黑客Bunnie Huang指出："问题在于，这些人能够用一点点预算就山寨了高质量的商品。这正是这些人所在做的事情中被人们所忽略掉的点。他们会说"啊，我的上帝啊，这真是一部糟糕的苹果手机"，然后又会说"天哪，他用五百美元的元件和一团电线制作出了一部苹果手机"。

In this ecosystem, there is no concept of intellectual property but also little economic incentive to just copy what someone else does exactly. No, there needs to be some form of innovation in the development process — either improve a feature, add a new capability, twist it into something that can be sold to a new market, or at least make the manufacturing or distribution processes faster or cheaper. In this way, shanzhai can become an incredibly innovative system, as rather than everyone harboring their own little patents in their own non-transparent little boxes, everything is thrown out into the open, people take whatever they want, add to it, and then recontribute what they do back to the collective pot.

在这个生态系统中，没有知识产权的概念，也很少有推动去完全抄袭其他人正在做的东西的经济刺激因素。不，在发展的过程中需要有某种形式的创新——或是改进一个特征，增加一种新的功能，将它加入到能够推出到新市场当中的产品里，或至少是让制造或分销过程更快，或成本更低。通过这种方式，山寨能够成为一种不可思议的创新体系，相比于每个人都讲他们的一点小专利珍藏于自己不透明的小盒子中，在这个体系里，每一件事情都被公诸于众，人们拿走他们想要的任何东西，随意增加元素，然后再重新卖出去。

Beyond sharing, the fundamental business strategy behind the shanzhai ecosystem is speed and constant adaption. This is a world where just about anything can be made almost instantaneously; a world where a product can be iterated, produced, and then sold around the world within a couple of weeks. Designs can come from fashion magazines, photos on websites like Amazon or Ebay, something someone saw somewhere, or could also be more or less original -- there are no hard rules here, and just about anything that can be sold is made. When sales of one product dries up they are already on to something new. So someone knocking-off Blooming Baths today may have been counterfeiting Forearm Forklifts yesterday; six months ago he may have been making hoverboards; a year before maybe he was making screens for smart phones.

在分享之外，山寨生态体系后面所隐藏的基础商业战略是速度和持续的改进。这是一个任何东西都能够被即刻打造出来的世界。设计来自潮流杂志，像亚马逊或易贝这样的网站上的照片，某人在某个地方见到的某种东西，或者或多或少有点原创的东西。这里没有什么严格的规定，任何东西都能够被造出来出售。当一种商品卖不动的时候，他们就已经在开发另一种新的商品了。所以今天山寨花瓣浴的那些人可能正是昨天仿造搬运带的人；六个月之前，他可能正在制造悬浮滑板；一年前，他可能正在为智能手机制造屏幕。

The versatility of grassroots Chinese manufacturing is something that is truly awesome. I’ve been in relatively small, "mom and pop" Shenzhen factories which made everything from cooling fans to wires for speakers to sex toys all in the same place. What they make on any given day is often a crap shoot — the workers come in, are handed photocopied instructions of whatever it is they will be making, and then they go and make it.

中国草根制造业的灵活性是真正令人惊叹的。我曾经去过规模相对较小的的深圳"零售商"工厂，我发现同一个地方可以制造从冷却风扇到话筒电线，再到性玩具等不同的产品。他们在某一天制造的可能是骰子，那些工人进场，手里拿着他们将要制造的东西的照片，然后就把它们造了出来。