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Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

arstechnica.com

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Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

#121

Post by tzs »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #105
tzs wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are pretty much the definition of counterfeit. The Oxford dictionary defines counterfeit as "Made in exact imitation of something valuable with the intention to deceive or defraud".

There's an implication that you're defrauding the person buying the counterfeit item. That's not true here; the person being "defrauded" is the copyright owner.

The buyer purchased a book that claims to be, and is marketed as, a No Starch Press book. No Starch Press books are known for their physical quality and their lay-flat binding. These books were lower quality and did not have a lay-flat binding.

How is that not defrauding the buyer?

Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

#122

Post by rchaud »

crowbahr wrote: post #109
Kevguy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newegg does at least have a 'Newegg only' checkbox so you can avoid the outside sellers. I will still buy electronics from Newegg for that reason. No longer trust Amazon for those.

Newegg is fine as long as you never have to return anything you've purchased. Which means it's not fine for Electronics. Their returns policy seems to be assuming that everyone attempting a return is malicious and trying to cheat them.

Yeah, I've always wondered why Newegg hasn't changed those unfriendly policies in nearly 15 years. I recall buying exactly 3-4 items from them: a digital camera in 2007, a couple of refurbished monitors in 2016, and a tablet in 2018.

The lack of free shipping seems insane given how much the products already cost, and the "Return minus 15% restocking fee" really doesn't make me want to come back.

Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

#123

Post by jdietrich »

microtherion wrote: post #97
kens wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a lot of charger teardowns, and very cheap chargers always violate UL safety rules. It's a combination of cost (e.g. triple-insulated transformers), it's hard to fit clearance distances into a small charger, sloppy manufacturing, and they don't seem to even try.

I respect your superior expertise, of course, but looking through another site that has done systematic teardowns and measurements ( https://lygte-info.dk/info/ChargerIndex%20UK.html ), it appears to me that this might be too categorical a statement. While counterfeit chargers almost always seem to be dangerous, there seem to be some Chinese brands which produce quite respectable chargers, while still being fairly in…

The point is that you don't know. A legitimate branded charger will have been tested in a certified test lab, while an off-brand or counterfeit charge is likely to have a counterfeit UL mark. It might be perfectly safe or it might be a complete deathtrap, because nobody has actually tested it for compliance.

Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

#124

Post by crowbahr »

lostapathy wrote: post #118
crowbahr wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10 is not inexpensive for wire snips though. Which is my complaint.

$10 is nothing compared to the cost of high end, quality hand tools that will last. In the case of a expecting to cut hardened wire, the cutter needs to be of a good alloy and hardened adequately to hold an edge. $10 doesn’t buy anything from the knipex catalog, for instance.

Guitar wire should be perfectly fine to cut with $10 snips. The $5 Stanley brand snips that I got to replace my terrible ones work like a charm.

I recognize I don't have the heaviest duty cut-through-anything shears that I could have with more money, but where I'm mainly doing light jobs like speaker wire and guitar strings it's not a problem... unless the snips themselves are terrible.

I don't expect to have to replace the Stanley set unless they become rusty from disuse.

Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

#125

Post by wyldfire »

behringer wrote: post #77
pault wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful with those fake chargers. They're known to catch fire.

There was a kid in the news recently who was electrocuted to death because of their fake charger. https://www.health.com/home/cell-phone-electrocution

That story looks bogus. Snopes [1] says:

> Neither Sinar Harian nor its English-language peer the New Strait Times asserted that the youngster was electrocuted by the earphones he was wearing, but that was the conclusion reached by a number of international publications, including widely-read U.S.-based Vice and Teen Vogue, both of whom aggregated the story.

...

> As an emergency room doctor, Uren& stopped short of calling the notion impossible because “I have seen some strange things in my career thus far,” but he added the story that the teen died from being electrocuted by earbuds “strains credibility.”

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/electrocuted-by-earphones/

Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

#126

Post by lostapathy »

vonmoltke wrote: post #89
jbay808 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ordered a textbook on control theory from Amazon. It arrived, but the material inside the covers is from a small animal veterinary textbook. Byaa different publisher. I took a closer look at the cover, it was poorly printed and didn't quite fit. I'm still confused about how the vendor expected to get away with it. Did they just guess that half of people won't bother opening the textbook? And why not fill it with bl…

Might just be that a large-scale counterfeit printing operation mixed up the covers and bound materials. There are probably counterfeit veterinary textbooks floating around that contain control theory materials.

Quite possible. It seems likely that the people assembling the counterfeits don’t even read English, let alone have enough interest in the material to notice.

Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

#127

Post by dragonwriter »

the-pigeon wrote: post #106
ProAm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its hard to admit you have a problem when your problem still brings in buckets of money everyday. I dont think they care, how much can a publisher or author sue amazon for peddling counterfeit wares? That is when it will matter, when they start losing large settlements.

Why hasn't the US Consumer Protection Bureau stepped in at this point? Isn't this exactly the sort of thing they are suppose to prevent?

> Why hasn't the US Consumer Protection Bureau stepped in at this point?

Because no such bureau exists?

You may be thinking of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which deals with financial products) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (which deals with physical safety issues), but (while physical safety issues are among the problems produced) neither one is really focussed on these issues.

The kind of fraud at issue is probably more in the bailiwick of the Federal Trade Commission and the International Trade Commission (when the original source is foreign), but probably most people affected by counterfeits are just returning products or eating the cost and not complaining to the FTC or the falsely-purported manufacturer (who, IIRC, would be the party in position to complain to the ITC).

Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

#128

Post by jdietrich »

joshu wrote: post #110
kens wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a lot of charger teardowns, and very cheap chargers always violate UL safety rules. It's a combination of cost (e.g. triple-insulated transformers), it's hard to fit clearance distances into a small charger, sloppy manufacturing, and they don't seem to even try.

I need a bunch of chargers for a sensor network (Right now using Wemos D1 Mini boards). Any advice on optimizing for price without compromising on safety? I don't trust the sellers that sell $2 chargers...

Anker, Aukey and Blitzwolf make reasonably priced and high quality chargers.

Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

#129

Post by umeshunni »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #40
leoc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classic "control fraud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud strategy is to incentivise your subordinates to maximise revenues while "neglecting" to check that they aren't engaging in fraud to do it. Then you can protest your innocence when the fraud comes to light.

This is partly why business is done on the golf course. Plausible deniability is quite lucrative.

> This is partly why business is done on the golf course.

What do you mean?

Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

#130

Post by joemi »

crowbahr wrote: post #74
ckastner wrote: post #4

The counterfeit and review manipulation issues have rendered Amazon unpleasant enough for me that buying local is something I've started to enjoy again. I trust the merchant to have performed some kind of vetting for merchandise sold on premise, and the price is often good or (interestingly enough) even better than on Amazon. Often enough local is still more expensive, but it beats browsing Amazon for an hour, siftin…

I purchased some wire cutters a year or two ago from Amazon and they were fine for the speaker wire I was cutting... Until this year when I tried to cut a guitar string with them and found a perfect guitar gauged hole in my snips every time I tried to cut. I was irate, having paid $10 for these. So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely d…

> So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely did, and were selling their awful snips but had changed their name and paid for a bunch of 5 star reviews again.

I wouldn't be so certain about that. I've found that there are a lot of sellers selling the same things, but they're not the same sellers under different names, they're just getting stuff from the same places. Often, for cheap things, the source is AliExpress (or Alibaba), or potentially cutting out that middleman and just getting them direct from the companies that sell on aliexpress/alibaba.

It's also been my experience that pretty much _anything_ that isn't a big name brand item being sold on Amazon can be found for much much cheaper on Aliexpress. The exact same product, just without the 1000%-2000% markup.

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