Analogy: The company I work for made the first nylon that went into carpets in the early 70's. This carpet component outperformed all other carpets components before ours. However, we sold our product at a higher price because our manufacturing processes were expensive.
Along comes Dupont in the late 70's. They produced a new nylon that was just as good as ours, but developed a manufacturing process that was inexpensive, thus they were able to sell the product less than we could. WE both still sold to rug companies, but we just had different methods or ingredients to our core component. Thus price became an issue with our "consumers".
Did my company yell and curse because they "cloned" our nylon? Did we feel a special need or niche because we had the first "authentic" nylon?. Did we feel we could be justified in continuing to charge relatively high prices for our product by going after Dupont with a "cease and desist"?
No. Times were changing and the market place began producing products that were cheaper, faster, stronger, lighter, etc. You either had to change and retool/rethink or you were out of the consumer picture. Consider the same thing with mods... It's beautiful to be the first "authentic" device, but sooner or later, someone will produce the same thing cheaper, faster...well, you know what I mean. You have to be able to change with the times OR continue to innovate the process or the construction to stay ahead of the game. First-outs always means high price, but soon that will fall as more manufacturers jump on the "latest thing" bandwagon.
For me, I'm kinda on both sides...I can't agree with someone cloning a device all the way down to the trademarks and logos, but identifying the device as "Nemesis STYLE Mod" or "in the STYLE of" verbiage would still give cudos to the original while stating that the device is NOT an authentic.
Now, an added definition to "counterfeit"...if you produce a fake product, "Clone" if you will, then try to pass it off as an AUTHENTIC, along with claimed values, then you have a counterfeit. Think of counterfeiting money or jewelry or paintings...what they all have in common is they claim to be original and charge the high prices due the originals. However, reproducing an original and calling it a copy, or clone, then charging a fair value for the copy would be where we are today.
Now when we get into copyrights or trademarks, there is a whole different ballgame and I think the industry would become more restrictive if everyone sued each other over "rights" and the consumer would lose out in the end.
FWIW
