Publishers Fight the Wrong Intellectual Property Battles

Golf clubs
“…U.S. publishers are providing the source material to intellectual-property thieves, says Frank Romano, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Print Media.”

Seriously this is EXACTLY what happened with golf clubs about 5 years ago. A few other countries like golf, but by and large, most of the business is in the USA, so therefore all the clubs were made here. Then someone realized that since its just a hunk of metal, and foundaries in China are much cheaper, they just signed some contracts and sent the molds to China.

So what happened? Well after making a set of $1200 Calloway iron heads, the Chinese factory takes the mold, deletes the logo, change something slightly and starts making identical club heads that wholesale for about $30 a set. The US club companies call these clubs ‘counterfit’ and in many cases the companies that import them have been sued. Part of this might be the Chinese don’t see this as bad – they did what they were contracted to do, and they had these molds just sitting around so they just kept using them. Attitudes toward ‘intellectual property’ and ‘piracy’ vary all over the world, and I’m not an expert on China, but this is my assumption.

The golf club manufacturers that used to produce their own clubs admit that they could eliminate counterfiting if they simply kept their manufacturing process in the USA, but EVEN WITH THE PIRACY its more profitable to do business this way. They could even stop sending their molds to the foundaries that counterfit their clubs, but they don’t, because those are the ones that are the best at making golf clubs (I wonder why…)

To answer your question Blake, American publishers ignore this fact because their costs are so much lower now they are making more profit, even with piracy. They made a business decision to do business with people they consider ‘pirates’.