{BEFORE YOU BEGIN: I meant for this to be a little post with a couple of thoughts and observations but the more I wrote and the more I thought and the more I thought the more I wrote and it spiraled out of control in a 3,000+ word leviathan. So either start with lots of time or feel free to cut bait and wait for the next one, which should only take a few days.}
In America intellectual property rights are a big deal. It’s such a big deal that we enshrined it in our blessed Constitution and not even one of those pesky afterthought Amendments. It’s right there, front and center in real deal: Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
It’s a concept so bedrock in the United States that I’d never really stopped to wonder if it made any sense. I get, broadly speaking, the argument: that the inventor of an idea or a thing should be allowed to profit from it for a reasonable while without the fuss of competition both because it’s just and because it will encourage more people to think up stuff so they can profit too thus generating more beneficial thoughts and things in the world. That sounds nifty and fair and beyond reproach. One walk down any busy street in Bangkok also reveals it’s a laughably highfalutin, ivory-tower concept.
All laws are either a priori or a posteriori. A priori laws are ones that people shouldn’t have to be told about in order to follow. You shouldn’t have to tell someone it’s not acceptable to set someone on fire. Ignorance of the law is no excuse when dealing with a priori laws. “Sorry, I didn’t know you’re not allowed to set people on fire,” will never, ever, never get you out of trouble no matter how good looking you are (lot’s of money and fancy lawyers are a separate issue).
A posteriori laws are essentially technical. Like which side of the road should you drive on? There’s nothing inherently right or wrong about either the left or the right side. At some point in the past a totally random choice was made and that’s what the society habituated itself to. If someone from a right side country hops in a car in a left side country and takes off down the wrong side of the street only to get pulled over by the police she could justifiably claim ignorance of the law and the police officer just might give her a pass. Especially if said person is really good looking. That’s an a posteriori law.
People are predisposed to think their a posteriori laws are actually a priori because it makes them seem more powerful. A law that some dudes sat around in a conference room thinking up or cobbled together on Google Drive with lobbyists lacks the metaphysical weight imparted by either God or the simple statement, “It’s obvious” (which is code for law in question being inherent to reality). Laws derived from Gods or Obviousness/Inherent-ness seem incontrovertible and eternal. Laws cooked up or wrestled into reality by some people in a room somewhere? They come and go. And one of the prominent ways they go is people stop obeying.
A law that everyone breaks with wanton disregard loses its power and is either written out or withers. The most famous example in the United States of a law written away is, of course, the end of Prohibition. Laws that wither into obscurity are, necessarily, obscure; like it’s illegal to stand around a building without a good reason for being there (MN) or you may only throw a frisbee on the beach in LA with a lifeguard’s permission (CA, obviously).
It seems a priori-style obvious that Starbucks should be able to decide what its logo is emblazoned upon and profit from it wherever it does. I’m not exactly saying that it shouldn’t but I am saying the idea that it’s even possible is rendered moot on the streets of Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur or Singapore (Tokyo is a different story). In a one kilometer walk down a Bangkok street you can buy Starbucks t-shirts, muscle shirts and cell phone cases in a dozen “hawker” stands (streets vendors who set up shop willy nilly on the sidewalks of busy areas…some of these stands are legal, most are not). The people selling this stuff aren’t exactly mobsters. They’re run by a fascinating gamut from B-Boy hipster dudes to grandmothers who are--and I mean this in the most positive possible way--hustling to make a living in a world that is exponentially wilder than in the United States.
One of the big items for hawkers hustling technology related stuff is “Beats by Dre” headphones. Before I continue, I have to step aside for a second to say I can’t believe how popular these things are. Back home, in LA, in Japan, in Singapore, in Malaysia, in Thailand. They are all over the place EVERYFRAKINGWHERE. For the record I’m happy for Dr. Dre that they are. He grew up hardscrabble, forged a successful career out of what--at the time--wasn’t even considered a musical genre, then helped shape the sound of modern pop music before fading away to do whatever it was he was doing for a decade. Then he stormed back into public consciousness not through music but through an accessory by which people listen to music.
Dr. Dre has made more money selling headphones than he did making music so, in a silly but not ridiculous sense, his entire hip hop career was laying a painstakingly elaborate groundwork to gain the street cred required to sell overpriced, moderate-but-not-spectacular quality luxury headphones. Dr. Dre is an honest-to-goodness “American Success Story.” The kind Americans like to think happen all the time but really only happen once in a great while, which is paradoxically why they’re so important to us (but we’ll save dwelling on that for another time). I am happy that Dr. Dre exists and I have personally been enriched by his existence through music.
I have no idea how many people have earned a living thanks to the efforts and entrepreneurship of the good Doctor. Beats employs 300 people with an operating income of $350 million (according to their no doubt self regulated Wikipedia page). That’s a fair number of people and it doesn’t even include the folks working in the factories in whatever Asian countries these things are being produced in and then all of the knockalong employment in the shipping industries, retailers, marketers, etc. Thank the Gods for people like Dr. Dre because without them not only would the world be a more boring place we wouldn’t have as much music or cool stuff. I would like to make my feeling here formal through a note meant for the good Doctor:
Dr. Dre, sir, in the extremely unlikely event you read this I want to personally thank you for making the world a better place through your existence, music, and headphones. As a teenager I spent Buddha-only-knows how many hours listening to music you produced (specifically I listened to The D.O.C.’s “No One Can Do It Better” so many times consecutively that one day I spontaneously freaked out and threw the tape out my car window, much to the chagrin of everyone else in the car). When I next go to temple I will pray to Buddha for you. Thank you and, to the extent you feel like it, keep it up.
Part of what I’ll be telling the Buddha I appreciate about Dr. Dre is the fact that pirated versions of his headphones have helped provide livelihoods for untold thousands of hawkers throughout Southeast Asia (and the world, one presumes) and untold thousands more that help make and distribute these things.
Yes, these headphones are technically “illegal” and Dr. Dre and the people who make a living through legal versions of them are being deprived of their “rightful” cut. I also suspect that at some point in the life of these products they probably pass through the hands or stewardship of unsavory characters (although I must confess that might be a prejudice: I just assume mobsters have to be involved in the production or distribution of knockoff products like headphones… and the very notion that the mob is inherently unsavory might be a prejudice as well). So in a very real sense that I can’t dispute these headphone are at least ethically problematic. No debates there.
I don’t claim to be able to look a person in the eye and see her or his soul for I have never been the President of the United States (a little known power apparently granted by the Constitution, or something). But I can tell you everyone I’ve seen selling Beats by Dre has definitely been a person. A real human being. Sometimes you can see little slices of their family life--parents, children, pets--in and around their hawker stands. Sometimes they’re sleeping in the middle of their little stalls. Sometimes they’re eating diner from the food hawker across the sidewalk. Some of them look borderline destitute, most of them look no different than the hoards of people passing by on the street buying their stuff. I’ve been barked at by well under 1% of the hawkers I’ve passed by. The vast majority of the time even if you stop to look at their stuff they won’t talk to you until talk to them first. So they may be hawkers but contrary to the English dictionary definition they aren’t loud or pushy about it.
I’ve never knowingly bought anything obviously counterfeit in my life. I do own a counterfeit Carles Puyol jersey but it was gift (much obliged, Micah). Thanks to a mix of factors that I wrote and then cut because this post is out of control--a love of headphones, KG, curiosity, liking the look of the hawker lady--I paid 200 baht for a for a pair of black “Beats by Dre Solo” headphones. No, I didn’t go for one of the flashy colors but the douchebag in front of me needed a mirror so he could try on a series of colors to check himself out… WEARING HEADPHONES! These headphones retail for $200 in the States: 200 baht is about $6. For a minute I thought what I was buying was just an empty Beats by Dre box. I was willing to pay 200 baht to find out. There were indeed headphones in the box. Would they even work?
I’ve never tried on a pair of legitimate Beats by Dre headphones so I can’t rightly compare but I can tell you the faux ones work just fine and seem to be of at least moderate quality. They are cheaper by more than half of any “around the ear” headphones I could find on Target.com and I for damn sure can gaurantee the quality is on par with or better than Target’s $17.99 Monster High Headphones. My faux Beats by Dre headphones are now what I wear when I’m listening to music at home. See for yourself but look long and hard because these puppies won’t be making the trek back to the US:
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| I'm pretty sure I'm listening to Outkast here. What would Dr. Dre think? |
How much money is Dr. Dre losing on these counterfeit headphones? I can’t imagine very much. The average Thai personal income is about 10% of the average personal income in the United States. Even after you factor in curious or value obsessed foreigners, it’s safe to say the market for $200+ Beats by Dre headphones is limited in Thailand, although certainly not non-existent thanks to a radical gap between the rich and everyone else {by the bye, Thailand’s wealth inequality is slightly LESS than in the United States… marinate on that for a minute, Americans}. For that matter so is the market for $18 Monster High Headphones is also limited, which is why I doubt Dr. Dre and his Beats employees are really all that hard done by these counterfeits. As a matter of fact I’d argue just opposite: that all of the fakes ultimately help sell more legitimate Beats by Dre headphones.
As far as I know there isn’t a big counterfeit culture in the United States (well, actually there is, but I’ll cover that in the next blog post). I know in the States counterfeits are here and there and fake fancy handbags are a thing but there seems to be a big difference between counterfeits here and home. Back home counterfeits are meant to fool people into thinking you own something you really don’t. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Take the Starbucks muscle t-shirt. As far as I know Starbucks has never produced an official muscle t-shirt. It doesn’t feel “on brand” to me. Quite to the contrary. It feels discordant. It’s a weird thing to put on a muscle t-shirt, which I’m pretty sure is at least part of the point. If you’re wearing a Starbucks muscle shirt you aren’t trying to fool people into thinking you bought it at Starbucks for an inflated price. You’re wearing it because it was cheap, you like muscle shirts, you like Starbucks, or whatever. You’re definitely not wearing it because you want people to think you found a very rare official Starbucks muscle shirt.
I think the same is true of fake Beats by Dre headphones. Now that I know what the fakes look like I can spot them with ease. They look more like the idea of Beats by Dre headphones rather than exacting replicas. I don’t think they’re meant to fool people into thinking you spent 30-times as much on your headphones as you really did. They’re meant to look like stylish, totally decent headphones, which is what they are, but they are also evocative of real Beats by Dre headphones, which is no doubt part of the reason I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them for the past month because--as I mentioned--the are EVERYWHERE. And to pull out the one truly great quote from Silence of the Lambs, “We begin by coveting what we see every day.”
Boy oh boy, was I coveting those Beats by Dre headphones. I’d never seriously thought about them before departing on our circuitous trip to Bangkok. They’re too flashy and are all but wearing a sign on your head that says, “I care more about how I look listening to music than what the music sounds like.” The only notable conceit I have in that realm is football/soccer gear (but I’ve gotten much, much better). Despite the fact I’m not a Beats by Dre target audience I can’t stop seeing them and thinking about them because slathering your brand willy nilly in the world so it can’t be missed is pretty much advertising 101. Yes, advertising evolved into nuanced messaging for specific audiences but that’s really just a way of being efficient (read: saving money).
I don’t care what the brand is; if it could be omnipresent in a natural, unmissable but not shrill way it would take that deal. Beats by Dre has achieved that in the megatropolises of Southeast Asia. I cannot imagine this doesn’t ultimately benefit Dr. Dre as marketing (I still haven’t seen the KG ad, just heard about it from Molly in LA) and better still I’m happy to report that it benefits a vast market of people with limited means who want inexpensive headphones of reasonable quality and passable fashion. Say, wait a minute… there’s something in there that sounds… oh, I don’t know, like… what’s it called?... that’s right: capitalism.
You know, the whole idea that entrepreneurs should recognize underserved, ignored, or new markets and find ways to service those markets and in so doing make a living? There are masses crying out for goods and services that aren’t being met through “traditional” (i.e. strictly legal) enterprises. So entire economies spring up in the shade of their legal counterparts providing goods to millions who’d otherwise be priced out.
These shade economies don’t have the time or resources to design and market test their own products. They aren’t capitalized. They aren’t launching IPO’s to turn the idea of money into fake money that might turn into real money some day. They have to give the people what they want and they have to do it for next to nothing because their customers have just a shade more than nothing. How do you do that? Turns out it’s easy. Just go the mall and look at what people are buying and copy that. Then sell that stuff to people who couldn’t otherwise buy the legitimate versions. To find fault in that is to text “let them eat cake” from your iPhone while using the handsfree interface in your late-model car as you pass a bus on the freeway and curse it for slowing down the carpool lane.
I can’t known their souls of the hawkers selling this stuff but if the police showed up with a court order from Starbucks or Beats by Dre to confiscate their merchandise I do know which side of that soul equation is twisted and in need of spiritual guidance. Sure the hawkers and these goods are technically in the wrong but to punish them for scratching out an existence would be tantamount to J. Montgomery Burns’ grandfather firing one of his turn of the 19th century “atom smashing” employees for stealing one, two, three, four… SIX atoms.
The US is perpetually fussing about this Mr. Burns-ian humbug. It's like we think just because we're the richest people in town we should be able to right the rules too. Our fussing isn't only with other nations (most notably China) but with ourselves (Eldred vs. Ashcroft). I imagine if America’s Federal Government had its way I these hawker stalls selling fake Starbucks shirts and Beats by Dre would have their merchandise confiscated. Of course, that isn’t going to happen for a variety of cultural and geopolitical reasons. I can only hope one of the reasons there’ll never be a crackdown on Beats by Dre headphones in hawker stands in farflung megatropolises straddling first and third worlds is Dr. Dre knows better than most of his business partners, employees, and political courtesans that the world is infinitely more complicated than can ever be accounted for by highfalutin, ivory tower a posteriori laws. He knows what it was like to eek out a living on the margins of modernity. He knows what it means to hustle.
I don’t. I’m not ashamed of that. No parent wants her or his child to grow up a hustler. I guarantee neither of the kids Dr. Dre had after he was comfortably ensconced in upper-class life are hustlers and they shouldn’t be. The more you have the more you appreciate all those technical a posteriori rules that protect your stuff but we don’t live in an a posteriori world yet. I have faith that we still might some day, Star Trek style… although I’m not holding my breath. But come on. Telling someone she can’t scratch out a living hawking her stuff on the street because it’s against the rules is as foolhardy as it is uncaring as it is nonsensical.
America’s obsession with intellectual property simply doesn’t jibe with reality, which clearly bothers me more than I’d anticipated when I started writing it, but what really drives me nuts is it’s hypocritical too. We’re supposed to be the champions of both democracy and capitalism and yet our love of intellectual property is an affront to both meaning our banging on about it is one thing I find hardest to forgive: hypocrisy.
Mercifully this hypocrisy is merely the work of some dudes who sat in some conference rooms and hacked out an high minded but ultimately ill-conceived law once upon a time and we know what can be done to laws like that. Now the only question is how long it will take until we can proudly wear our Starbucks muscle shirts while listening to our faux Beats by Dre headphones as readily on the Great Plains of America as on the streets of Bangkok.
Rest assured, no matter how long that does or doesn’t take, I’ll partake of neither. That’s not my style. This is:
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