Allbirds is a luxury brand. Retailers offer cheap versions of luxury brands. There's little surprise here. Should Ray-Bans complain that Walmart offers sunglasses that look nearly identical at a tenth of the price?
Amazon has plenty of dodgy business practices, but I don't think this is one of them.
If you go to a grocery store, you'll find many versions of cheddar cheese specifically. Some of it is blocked, some slices, some shredded. You'll also find that in at least one of these forms, the store has it's own brand – called a "private label" – of cheddar cheese, probably shredded. Because Kroger, or Wal Mart, or Whole Foods has said "hey, selling cheddar cheese is a good idea and we can compete in our own stores". So they make a competing congruent product, maybe quality and prices are lower, but that's OK. The customer can make their own decision on which cheese to buy.
This is exactly the same concept as Amazon's private label businesses.
There isn't a design there that's being copied or a brand being appropriated. I mean however many centuries back someone figured out cheddar cheese, but nobody alive has a proprietary claim to it.
Somewhat of a tangent, but in the EU there is "brand" type protection for many types of cheese (think Parmesan), they have to come from the specified geographic area and use proper production methods, or else use a different name.
I don't think so personally. It is a pretty blatant ripoff of course, but Dr Pepper has also been around for a long time now (at least a century?)
I don't think copyrights/patents/whatever apply, but if you think of the principles behind them as a bit of a guide, designing a novel product should ideally let you profit off it exclusively for a while (to incentivize invention), but probably not forever (to allow competition and lower prices).
Because designers spend an entire year designing what they are going to sell as their line for the year and when they show it on the runway, Zara takes a photo and has it mass produced and sent to stores in two weeks. They do this consistently. It is dodgy.
a luxury brand comes together with materials and manufacturing quality.
if Zara or any other generic can compete on these, you never were a luxury brand to begin with.
on the other hand Zara specific strategy of violating copyright deserves flack on its own. but it's unrelated with the problem at hand: a brand selling premium stuff at a quality point that's easily emulated is not premium, it's the equivalent of patent trolling in the digital world: they're trying to get a premium out of owning generic concepts like tote bags or high neck sweaters.
The obvious counterargument is that people like the designer clothing not because of the amount of effort spent designing it, but because of the designer brand itself.
For what it's worth, I spend extra money on Ugmonk clothes not because I want you to go, "Wow, Ugmonk!" I do it because of the quality of the goods and design and because I want to support the designer. Originally I wore Allbirds because of this too.
I don't know if I am normal nationally, but locally this is a big part of the culture around these more costly goods. It is in the same vein, I might add, as "buying American".
Is this part of "brand?" Certainly. Does that divorce it from effort or quality? Certainly not.
The designer hasn't missed out on sales since it is unlikely to be bought at the prices they sell at. It's the same argument someone can make over downloading a movie instead of buying or paying for a streaming service, right?
I’m not going to argue the capitalism aspect as others already have, but there’s also things called copyright, patents, and trademarks. They can be used against people stealing your design.
This is an opinion, not a fact. It's not at all clear that design theft actually leads to better goods at lower prices. It is at least as valid and interpretation that design theft changes the coarse shape by parasitical copying of designer's work, without changing the quality.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. That's business. The fact that your designers worked hard is irrelevant. Capitalism is by its very nature competitive, and it's on you as a business owner to figure out a working model in a world with fast followers.
It's a bit like complaining that someone blocked your shot in basketball. It's allowed, those are the rules, do better next time.
If you don’t think this should be allowed (and it’s sort of pointless to argue dodginess if it’s perfectly legal) you have to logically argue for much more stringent IP protection.
Added: Of course some protections do exist and I don’t doubt some knockoffs skirt or outright violate those protections.
One could argue as well we should minimize the draw of purely romanticized notions that premium things should exist.
Other than inflated pricing pushing more money around in one go than cheaper stuff pushing a lot of little money around, what does owning premium accessories get humanity?
Stop manufacturing final products & retail can be just the materials that enable people to make their own accessories if we’re worried about style differentiation.
Or we could keep drilling into ideas like yours which will result in more consolidation of economic activity in the hands of the haves.
Like markets, brands are simply propped up by feels. IMO pretty sick of being told I need to give a crap about Coach as a business so a minority can actually design/create while the majority get to deal with their HR and accounting needs.
Its funny because folks are arguing in this very same thread that we're also not allowed to hate the game, as they raise the hypothesis that capitalism makes "better goods cheaper".
As in Basketball, there are things which are technically legal but will get your ass kicked if you keep doing them in a street game.
Folks should be mad about design theft and they should do their best to buy goods that are quality and meet their requirements. The idea raised here and in other parts of a thread that shoveling cheap goods that superficially resemble high quality and well-designed goods is in fact good is very hard for me to process.
We're supposed to have power as consumers. But then we're also subjected to constant misinformation by vendors, making that choice difficult. We should not be applauding those abusive vendors. They are abusing the players of the game.
You're shifting the goalposts. Presenting misinformation to consumers is generally illegal, and is also a completely separate concern from copying and building off of others' innovations. I haven't seen any comments here that support outright tricking unsuspecting customers into accidentally buying a cheap knockoff when they were looking for a higher-quality original.
A common misconception creatives tend to have about business is that it's 100% about crafting a unique and/or valuable product or service. It's not. There are innovations and competitive advantages one can have in distribution, sales, branding, pricing, and many other areas. These can also drive business success, and it is not scummy or dodgy to put them to use.
Some products are naturally defensible (e.g. the network effects of a social network) and some are protected by copyright and other laws (e.g. writing, photos, and logos, but not clothing or, in this case, shoe design), but the vast majority are wide open to competition, and it's your job as a business owner to either figure it out or avoid those industries.
You aren't automatically entitled to overall business success just because you were the first to do X or you worked the hardest on it. Doesn't matter if it's wool shoes, v-neck shirts, autotune in your music, customer support chat widgets, a mobile operating system, or like buttons in your social app. Just because you're a designer who likes designing and works hard at it doesn't make design a defensible business strategy in your industry.
> I haven't seen any comments here that support outright tricking unsuspecting customers into accidentally buying a cheap knockoff when they were looking for a higher-quality original.
Except copying someone else's design and presenting it as your own is literally that infraction? Asymmetrical capitalization and the cost of the legal system means that capitalized companies are much more capable of design theft.
And of course, this ignores whole industries that exist by getting others to lie for them and then simply speak misleadingly (e.g., chiropractors).
> A common misconception creatives tend to have about business is that it's 100% about crafting a unique and/or valuable product or service. It's not. There are innovations and competitive advantages one can have in distribution, sales, branding, pricing, and many other areas.
A common misconception that business people have is that there is anything to optimize without a product or service around which to optimize. There isn't. When said business types lose the forest for the trees and see money as more valuable than the goods and services it is supposed to proxy for, we end up with the current situation and people in this thread arguing that somehow design theft is okay because it was executed efficiently.
> Some products are naturally defensible (e.g. the network effects of a social network) and some are protected by copyright and other laws (e.g. writing, photos, and logos, but not clothing or, in this case, shoe design), but the vast majority are wide open to competition, and it's your job as a business owner to either figure it out or avoid those industries.
What are you actually saying with this paragraph? Thar Allbirds should take Amazon to court over copyright infringement? Or design patents?
It's too bad you feel that we're not allowed as consumers to dislike or even consider the business practices of where our products come from. That would be a useful and informative thing to consider, especially in a world where some capitalist institutions are responsible for a significant fraction of the ongoing process of very literally threatening the survival of the human race.
But no. Efficient theft is moral because it costs the consumer less.
> You aren't automatically entitled to overall business success just because you were the first to do X or you worked the hardest on it. Doesn't matter if it's wool shoes, v-neck shirts, autotune in your music, customer support chat widgets, a mobile operating system, or like buttons in your social app.
Hard work is meaningless, only capitalization matters. Got it. This system is great.
> Just because you're a designer who likes designing and works hard at it doesn't make design a defensible business strategy in your industry.
>Hard work is meaningless, only capitalization matters. Got it. This system is great.
Hard work by itself IS pretty much is meaningless. As a consumer I really don't care (for the most part) how many times you iterated on design or process or business model or whatever to come up with your product. It may well be a necessary ingredient in many/most cases. But I'm likely not buying your product over a cheaper/better/etc. competitor because you put in more blood/sweat/tears.
> Hard work by itself IS pretty much is meaningless. As a consumer I really don't care (for the most part)
I'd argue the ongoing direction of consumer advertising suggests that you're not as craft-agnostic as you claim "as a consumer." Everyone's brands are trying to connect with human experience and human effort, and an appeal to human problems. Even computer motherboard advertisements have a funny tendency to omit the spec sheet and the price and focus on what they let you do and how they're different.
And then there are companies like Apple.
> But may well be a necessary ingredient in many/most cases. But I'm likely not buying your product over a cheaper/better/etc. competitor because you put in more blood/sweat/tears.
Again, I'm not sure this is true. But the idea that "hard work is meaningless" fundamentally ignores that the basis of an economy is goods and services, not money. Without those goods and services, which are essentially the definition of hard work, every other aspect of the business would be meaningless.
So at some level, hard work must matter. And if it didn't, why are companies copying the designs? Can't they just scribble something on a default shoe and call it a day?
> So at some level, hard work must matter. And if it didn't, why are companies copying the designs? Can't they just scribble something on a default shoe and call it a day?
You're confusing inputs with outputs, processes with results. Hard work is a process that may lead to a quality final result. But consumers don't pay for the process. They pay for the result.
They absolutely pay for the process. Without huge capital asymmetries, price competition actually works and the underlying costs actually set the floor of the market. It's a much more sane system.
It's when we decide that design theft is defensible because it creates inferior, copycat goods that are cheaper, and that's somehow been defined as laudable progress by you in this thread.
What you call design theft I call commoditization. Of course businesses and creators fear it, because they want to capture as much value for themselves as possible, and so they will paint it as theft if they can get away with doing so.
But commoditization is great for consumers and has been for centuries, and high-quality luxury goods are still available for those who care to spend more money on that sort of thing.
> What you call design theft I call commoditization.
Then you're factually wrong. Commoditization does not include design theft. If we're talking about handcrafted sunglasses and then someone else makes a machine-created alternative that looks different but has similar properties, that'd be more inline.
That said, defining designer goods as "commodities" is a hell of a stretch for that word. Assuming good faith, you're drawing a parallel. But if I were not very firmly and strenuously looking for a good faith explanation, I'd worry you're just using "an economics word" to make it sound like you have a theoretically backed argument.
> But commoditization is great for consumers and has been for centuries, and high-quality luxury goods are still available for those who care to spend more money on that sort of thing.
Considering actual commodities by the dictionary definition, this is true up to a point. But it doesn't really apply to finished goods.
> Except copying someone else's design and presenting it as your own is literally that infraction?
No, it's different. The infraction in question would be, say, copying a Rolex watch and putting "Rolex" on it. In that case, the copier would not be presenting it as their own. They'd be presenting it as a Rolex, in order to fool people into buying their knockoff.
If one were to instead copy the design of a Rolex watch, then put their own company's name on the face, it would be wholly inaccurate to describe this as "tricking unsuspecting customers into accidentally buying a cheap knockoff," since any customers who are shopping for the original Rolex brand would (by definition) be aware of the Rolex brand name.
> We end up with the current situation and people in this thread arguing that somehow design theft is okay because it was executed efficiently.
You continue to say "design theft," presumably to make the case that it is an axiomatically wrong thing do. The reality is that this is not theft. Theft has a very particular definition, and is wrong because it it deprives the victim of an actual good or item that was in their position.
What's actually happening is not theft but "copying," which is in no way axiomatically wrong, and is instead the very mechanism by which humanity has grown and thrived, as it is a necessary component of innovation. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" and all that.
There are specific instances of copying that we've outlawed for purely utilitarian purposes. This is copyright/patent/trademark law, which again, is wholly separate from theft, both in denotation and morally. And even copyright infringement doesn't apply here, because as far as I'm aware, there are no copyright laws protecting the design of a shoe.
I'm not an expert, but I'd guess at most we're dealing with potential trade dress infractions here, and even that's arguable.
> What are you actually saying with this paragraph? That Allbirds should take Amazon to court over copyright infringement? Or design patents?
If Amazon is violating the law, sure. If not, that's Allbirds' problem to solve with whatever business strategy they choose. Why wouldn't it be? Are they entitled to business success?
If Allbirds' product and business is truly more appealing, and that matters to consumers, they'll choose Allbirds. However, if people don't care about the things Allbirds thinks they care about, then Allbirds will suffer and competitors who better cater to actual consumer desires will thrive. As it should be.
> It's too bad you feel that we're not allowed as consumers to dislike or even consider the business practices of where our products come from.
Where did I say you shouldn't be allowed to do that? You can vocalize support for whoever you want. You can also vote with your dollars by shopping at your favorite companies.
If consumers like Allbirds more than Amazon's shoes, there's nothing stopping them from buying Allbirds. I happen to like Allbirds' sustainable approach, personally, even though I don't buy their shoes.
But they are not entitled to win the market just because they were first, and their case against Amazon is a business challenge to be surmounted, not a legitimate moral issue.
> But no. Efficient theft is moral because it costs the consumer less.
Again, it's not theft, and it's not immoral.
> Hard work is meaningless
Yes, if we're talking about how the market rewards companies and creators, hard work is meaningless. Why should it be otherwise?
The point of capitalism is to incentivize us to provide value to others, not to incentivize us to work hard for its own sake. Hard work is merely a means (sometimes an optional one) to an end, and provides no direct value to consumers itself.
"Person X works hard, therefore they should be paid more" is another very common misconception about how the market operates. Intuitively, that makes sense on a personal, familial, or tribal level. We want to show appreciation for the people we interact with. But those personal relationships are not analogous to how the market does or should reward people.
> Is this addressed to me?
No, I meant the figurative "you" aka "one" or "someone."
> No, it's different. The infraction in question would be, say, copying a Rolex watch and putting "Rolex" on it. In that case, the copier would not be presenting it as their own. They'd be presenting it as a Rolex, in order to fool people into buying their knockoff.
Given that many brands are not exclusively a maker's mark, most folks can't even be reasonably informed in the first place without asking. But even if we ignore that, it's worth pointing out that your argument only is true for small independent designers. Big brands absolutely do sue if they feel their design has been copied, and they win.
Apple won their case against Samsung, you know.
> You continue to say "design theft," presumably to make the case that it is an axiomatically wrong thing do. The reality is that this is not theft. Theft has a very particular definition, and is wrong because it it deprives the victim of an actual good or item that was in their position.
But isn't design theft specifically depriving craftspeople and artisans of renumeration for their work, which we have been implicitly confining to product design?
> What's actually happening is not theft but "copying," which is in no way axiomatically wrong, and is instead the very mechanism by which humanity has grown and thrived, as it is a necessary component of innovation. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" and all that.
The problem is that the consumer doesn't necessarily even know have a choice between the artisan good and the mass-produced copy. In a modern global market, this matters a lot.
> If Amazon is violating the law, sure. If not, that's Allbirds' problem to solve with whatever business strategy they choose. Why wouldn't it be? Are they entitled to business success?
You keep implying that the law defines morality, or that the law should inform consumer sentiment. There are plenty of legal but reprehensible things. Amazon is a reprehensible company doing awful things, and this is just one in a long list of harms that we should recognize they are perpetrating and hold them accountable as a society.
You're arguing that if it is not illegal, it should not be something we can hold them accountable for. I find this idea extremely dystopian, demanding that people abdicate all free will and morality to government. Why even have a free market if we can't judge the qualities of the people and objects we interact with.
If folks know these things and choose not to buy the artisan good? Very well. But you're arguing that not only shouldn't they have that choice, but that to even ask for it or expect to be able to make it is itself wrong because no law was broken.
> Where did I say you shouldn't be allowed to do that? You can vocalize support for whoever you want. You can also vote with your dollars by shopping at your favorite companies.
You argue this again above. You're not only making value judgements and spuriously arguing that design theft is a victimless crime, but then you're also suggesting that a thing must be illegal to be wrong.
> But they are not entitled to win the market just because they were first, and their case against Amazon is a business challenge to be surmounted, not a legitimate moral issue.
They weren't first, but they were doing a good job. Then Amazon comes along to annihilate the market.
> Again, it's not theft, and it's not immoral.
Again, it is and it your value judgement isn't objective, nor is it mine.
> Yes, if we're talking about how the market rewards companies and creators, hard work is meaningless. Why should it be otherwise?
Except! The hard work of the Allbirds designers is rewarding someone. It's just not the Allbirds designers or the folks they've signed rights to. It's being parasitically extracted by Amazon.
> The point of capitalism is to incentivize us to provide value to others, not to incentivize us to work hard for its own sake. Hard work is merely a means (sometimes an optional one) to an end, and provides no direct value to consumers itself.
The "point"? That's not the historical interpretation of capitalism any economist takes seriously. Unrestricted capitalism rapidly destroys free market competition by exactly these mechanisms. The debate is about if that is good or not.
> "Person X works hard, therefore they should be paid more" is another very common misconception about how the market operates
The demand is not to work hard. It's to acknowledge the work that made a good or service possible rather than taking the benefit of that away from the origin. This distorts the notion of free markets far less than capitalism.
> Given that many brands are not exclusively a maker's mark, most folks can't even be reasonably informed in the first place without asking. But even if we ignore that, it's worth pointing out that your argument only is true for small independent designers. Big brands absolutely do sue if they feel their design has been copied, and they win.
If your complaint is that the legal system unfairly benefits whichever entity has more resources, I completely agree, and I wish this was a cause that more people would champion.
> But isn't design theft specifically depriving craftspeople and artisans of renumeration for their work, which we have been implicitly confining to product design?
We're getting into semantics here, but theft as a philosophical, moral, and legal concept has a very specific meaning. You can only steal "rivalrous" goods, which harms the stolen-from party for obvious and intuitive reasons that anyone can understand.
It's only recently in human history that we've begun to assign rightful ownership to intangible non-rivalrous things such as ideas, inventions, designs, words, and the like. And that came about not for moral reasons so much as for utilitarian reasons, e.g. perhaps we will incentivize more creation if we give creators temporary monopolies over profiting from their intangible ideas.
Of course, any copyright owner is financially incentivized to extend their ownership for as long as possible, and so thanks to lobbying from companies like Disney, copyrights now extend dozens of times longer than their original length. And we also have new propaganda terms like "intellectual property" which were intentionally created to get people to begin thinking of ideas as property, and copyright violation as theft, and immoral. Unfortunately it seems to be working.
But it's not theft. Nobody is actually being deprived of any goods. Nobody is actually "stealing" any designer's work from their shelves and drawers. This is 100% about people wanting to be granted exclusive legal access to profit. Which is fine if they want to lobby for that, but using words like "theft" is inaccurate and propaganda, and injects a moral component where there is none.
> You're not only making value judgements and spuriously arguing that design theft is a victimless crime
I don't think my argument is spurious at all, so I explained it more detail above. I'm genuinely curious to see you build a case for why this morally bad.
To my mind, at best, the victim's complaint is some version of, "I should be able to profit more from activity X." That's not a moral argument to me. That's a legal and economic argument about to best structure our capitalistic society to incentivize creators. But I would like to hear your framing.
> You're arguing that if it is not illegal, it should not be something we can hold them accountable for.
No, not at all. I'm arguing that it's not actually immoral (see above). Thus, by process of elimination, this is either a legal matter or no matter at all.
> If folks know these things and choose not to buy the artisan good? Very well. But you're arguing that not only shouldn't they have that choice, but that to even ask for it or expect to be able to make it is itself wrong because no law was broken.
We must be talking past each other, because I sincerely don't understand why you think I'm arguing this. Where am I saying that people shouldn't have this choice? I've said the opposite.
I think Allbirds should have the right to brand its goods as Allbirds so people know who made it, Amazon and other distributors should not be able to obscure that information, and other companies should not be able to copy that mark. I believe all of these requirements are true today, too.
Consumers have choices and they have access to information, and from my perspective, you're simply worried that they will choose Amazon, who you don't want to win.
> The "point"? That's not the historical interpretation of capitalism any economist takes seriously. Unrestricted capitalism rapidly destroys free market competition by exactly these mechanisms. The debate is about if that is good or not.
Yes, the point. Nobody is saying capitalism should be unrestricted. In my view, capitalism is created by restrictions. It's all about restrictions.
It's an attempt to limit the ways that people and companies can profit so that they're forced to do so in ways that create value for consumers, e.g. innovation, lower prices, easier access.
That requires regulations against profiting in ways that destroy value for consumers, e.g. anti-competitive practices, misleading consumers, collusion, corporate espionage, bribery, violence, blackmail, creating unsafe products, dumping toxic sludge in rivers to save money, etc.
Of course, the regulations we have aren't perfect, and never will be. It's a messy business with moving targets.
But no, I don't support unrestricted capitalism. Quite the opposite. In fact, I think the term "unrestricted capitalism" is basically nonsensical and an oxymoron.
The difference between you and me is that I don't believe that turning boutique products into commodities is theft. Further, I think it's a clear win for consumers, as evidenced by the fact that they're quite happy to pay for cheaper and more easily available products.
Maybe this means that some businesses (like Allbirds) will find it harder to live up to their lofty billion dollar valuations. Maybe it means that some small businesses fail. Often, big businesses fail, too, for similar reasons. But that's the game they're choosing to play. Success isn't guaranteed, and I personally don't like it when business owners feel so entitled to success that they expect the rules to be changed in their favor.
> The demand is not to work hard. It's to acknowledge the work that made a good or service possible rather than taking the benefit of that away from the origin.
Sure, I don't disagree, but hard work is one of many components. Hard work is not sufficient on its own -- you could imagine someone working hard painting a wall that nobody needs painted, and creating zero value for anyone, possibly negative value. Hard work is also not always necessary -- you can imagine an cheerful dad coaching little league baseball, having fun, barely working, yet providing value to all involved.
It's not the hard work we should be rewarding. It's the final result. And by rewarding the final result (via consumers purchasing goods), we indirectly reward all the constituent parts that are required to produce those results, which might change over time and from industry to industry. It's much simpler and more accurate than trying to place a value on hard work.
> We're getting into semantics here, but theft as a philosophical, moral, and legal concept has a very specific meaning. You can only steal "rivalrous" goods, which harms the stolen-from party for obvious and intuitive reasons that anyone can understand.
I'm trying to find a reason why you've got such an elaborate and specific definition of theft (when english dictionaries certainly don't include it) but when you use words that have clear meanings in the space of economics you're willing to stretch them to metaphorical limits (e.g., your use of "commodities" and "commodification" to suggest outright copies of existing goods are good for consumers.
> It's only recently in human history that we've begun to assign rightful ownership to intangible non-rivalrous things such as ideas, inventions, designs, words, and the like. And that came about not for moral reasons so much as for utilitarian reasons, e.g. perhaps we will incentivize more creation if we give creators temporary monopolies over profiting from their intangible ideas.
This isn't true. The idea of misrepresenting other people's work as your own as theft (in particular: music and writtne work) is an old concept with examples in literature long before the advent of copyright law. It's pretty trivial.
> Of course, any copyright owner is financially incentivized to extend their ownership for as long as possible, and so thanks to lobbying from companies like Disney, copyrights now extend dozens of times longer than their original length. And we also have new propaganda terms like "intellectual property" which were intentionally created to get people to begin thinking of ideas as property, and copyright violation as theft, and immoral. Unfortunately it seems to be working.
The infinite extension of copyright in the US is a bad thing, I agree. But there is a difference between "infinity is bad" and "allowing people to be rewarded for their work in a society that starves them if they don't work" that clearly exists. You seem to agree that design and art is work.
But if we're going to level the accusation of "goalpost shifting", it sure seems like a goalpost shift that you're trying to draw a line from "infinite Disney copyright" to "Amazon has created an inferior but vaguely similar looking product and used their historically unprecedented and immense capitalization and ability to manipulate the retail market to capture the profits a small vendor was growing."
> But it's not theft. Nobody is actually being deprived of any goods. Nobody is actually "stealing" any designer's work from their shelves and drawers.
Theft is not exclusively limited to "goods" in any framework I can find. Money is not a "good" but stealing money is clearly theft.
> This is 100% about people wanting to be granted exclusive legal access to profit.
Well yes, because this is what they're required to do in a capitalist society that says they starve if they don't work. And since we're at least in agreement that design work, performance and art are work with concrete (if relative) value, this is most folks only option. A few hundred years ago, you might have said "access to patronage" instead of "exclusive access to profit".
> Which is fine if they want to lobby for that, but using words like "theft" is inaccurate and propaganda, and injects a moral component where there is none.
If it means they're materially damaged, isn't that the immoral bit? We can surely argue for moral and immoral theft and there is a rich tradition of this (starting from the most basic, "if a starving family steals a loaf of bread from a store to feed their kids, that is theft but is it immoral"
Oh also:
> We must be talking past each other, because I sincerely don't understand why you think I'm arguing this. Where am I saying that people shouldn't have this choice? I've said the opposite.
You literally just did this. You just said:
> I'm arguing that it's not actually immoral (see above). Thus, by process of elimination, this is either a legal matter or no matter at all.
Not only is this begging the question, but it's a false ... uh... trichotomy? That's a word now.
Skipping ahead:
> No, not at all. I'm arguing that it's not actually immoral (see above). Thus, by process of elimination, this is either a legal matter or no matter at all.
You were arguing it shouldn't be immoral and using as evidence of this that it is not illegal. Your definition of "theft" is curiously limited, but I think this is all a distraction. Ask anyone on the street if misrepresenting a musician's work as your own without permissions is moral. You will get an unambiguous answer.
Given how obvious this value is in our culture, your presentation of it as "not theft" seems... well... it stands out.
> Yes, the point. Nobody is saying capitalism should be unrestricted. In my view, capitalism is created by restrictions. It's all about restrictions.
This is not a well-supported view by history, economics or the philosophies underlying economics.
> It's an attempt to limit the ways that people and companies can profit so that they're forced to do so in ways that create value for consumers, e.g. innovation, lower prices, easier access.
This is not even faintly the definition of capitalism. Its also an attempt to define it by intent which is... a strange anthropomorphism.
> But no, I don't support unrestricted capitalism. Quite the opposite. In fact, I think the term "unrestricted capitalism" is basically nonsensical and an oxymoron.
I'm sorry, you're strictly wrong here. "Unrestricted capitalism" has a clear definition. It means "the deciding political and social factor is the accumulation and exercise of capital." This is only a few steps removed from, "the deciding political and social factor is the blessings of our Lord and Savior upon the King's family."
The thing you're discussing is interesting, but it's difficult to parse because you're muddling it with a lot of pre-existing terms in this space.
From the first line of Wikipedia's article on theft: "In common usage, theft is the taking of another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it."
From Dictionary.com: "the act of stealing; the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another; larceny.'
It's you and others who have to torture these definitions to begin using a term like "design theft," which very clearly doesn't involve depriving the owner of property or carrying anything away, and is obviously just copying instead.
If you have a counterargument to this, I haven't seen it yet, nor do I understand what it is. Why should we redefine copying as theft? It honestly just seems like propaganda to me. I'm making my points in good faith here.
> your use of "commodities" and "commodification" to suggest outright copies of existing goods are good for consumers.
I'm not trying to equate commoditization with copying. Rather, what I'm saying is that the entire process of commoditization is driven by people creating copies of other goods, or at least extremely similar versions. That's how it works. How else would commoditization happen, exactly?
Amazon is threatening to turn Allbirds' unique design into an entire category, and Allbirds doesn't like it:
> It's you and others who have to torture these definitions to begin using a term like "design theft," which very clearly doesn't involve depriving the owner of property or carrying anything away, and is obviously just copying instead.
So you're saying if I rob your bank account it's not theft because it's not a physical good.
Okay.
> Amazon is threatening to turn Allbirds' unique design into an entire category, and Allbirds doesn't like it.
I am convinced you're misrepresenting what Amazon is doing. I've been trying to avoid that conclusion, but I can't avoid it any longer. Wool shoes aren't new. There are vendors before now. What is new is Allbird's specific look and minimally branded aesthetic. That is what Amazon is abusing.
> If you do something new, others will build off of it, and while that may be a challenge for you, it is a very good thing for consumers.
Let's destroy capitalism together to make this more likely to be true.
> So you're saying if I rob your bank account it's not theft because it's not a physical good. Okay.
It's not about the physicality of the good. It's about it being rivalrous. If you take my money, I no longer have my money. You're not copying it. You're literally taking it away. Hence it's theft. I know you're more than intelligent enough to understand this concept if you try.
> I am convinced you're misrepresenting what Amazon is doing. I've been trying to avoid that conclusion, but I can't avoid it any longer. Wool shoes aren't new. There are vendors before now. What is new is Allbird's specific look and minimally branded aesthetic. That is what Amazon is abusing.
Okay sure, but that doesn't change anything about my argument. Allbirds' look is being commoditized, and perhaps in the future there will be an entire category of minimally-branded wool shoes, just like today we have entire categories of similar-looking shoes like wingtips.
> Let's destroy capitalism together to make this more likely to be true.
> It's not about the physicality of the good. It's about it being rivalrous. If you take my money, I no longer have my money
But that's not true in the case of a bank account. Its insured. And often times you dont even get to see that the bank lost money, because of how banks are structured internally. And even if the bank can't insure it's the government can just print more money (and frequently does, without substantially impacting the value of the currencily). So me robbing your bank account isn't immoral, by your logic.
It seems to me like there is a hole in your metaphorical boat here if it allows such an obviously immoral action to be considered.
At some point you need to admit that reducing the potential value of someone else's work or property or depriving them of a livelihood in some fashion is some sort of theft. Otherwise you're just begging people to produce a series of trivial and obvious examples showing these kinds of obvious contradictions.
> Okay sure, but that doesn't change anything about my argument. Allbirds' look is being commoditized, and perhaps in the future there will be an entire category of minimally-branded wool shoes, just like today we have entire categories of similar-looking shoes like wingtips.
There already is this market. Tom's did it before and there are plenty of other examples. Amazon's specifically copying one vendor and then using their horizontal integration to hide the fact that Allbirds even exists.
That's not a commoditized good no matter how much you want to try and repeat the phrase.
> But that's not true in the case of a bank account. Its insured. And often times you dont even get to see that the bank lost money, because of how banks are structured internally. And even if the bank can't insure it's the government can just print more money (and frequently does, without substantially impacting the value of the currencily). So me robbing your bank account isn't immoral, by your logic.
The fact that my money gets replaced by someone who has agreed to do so (the bank, the insurer, whoever) doesn't mean it wasn't stolen. The very fact that someone had to reimburse or replace it is proof that it was stolen. That reimbursement couldn't happen otherwise.
Perhaps you could argue that it was stolen from the bank and not from me, sure. But it was still stolen.
Compare to copying. If you share an idea or reveal a shoe design, and then I copy you, have you been deprived of that idea or design? No. It's still in your possession, which it never left, not even for a moment. Nobody needs to reimburse you by giving you another copy of that idea to replace the one you lost, because you never lost it.
> At some point you need to admit that reducing the potential value of someone else's work or property or depriving them of a livelihood in some fashion is some sort of theft.
Reducing the potential value of someone else's work or property is literally the very essence of competition in a capitalistic system lol.
And this is what I predicted your argument would boil down to in the very end. You can't build a case that there was any actual theft of an idea. The best you can do is argue that original worker should be entitled to an exclusive right to profit from that idea. That concept has a name, and it's called copyright, not theft.
> Otherwise you're just begging people to produce a series of trivial and obvious examples showing these kinds of obvious contradictions.
You haven't shown any contradictions. For some reason you just aren't grokking the concept of rivalrous vs nonrivalrous goods.
Hopefully Oracle wins in their case against Google, then, that would set a precedent to stop interface copyright violations. In a sense, sunglasses could be considered an interface, and anyone who copies the same shape of the interface violates that copyright (even if the materials are slightly different).
It's dodgy for the same reason it's dodgy to print and sell a new novel without paying the author, for the same reason it's dodgy to clone a successful app and sell it without any attempt to improve on it. On one hand you have a system where companies support the creation of new designs so that they can profit from the reproduction of them, and on the other you have companies operating parasitically so they can get a share of the profits without providing any support to the designers.
I would be interested in seeing the results of an HN poll: "Do you agree with the existence of intellectual property laws?" It seems like a divisive topic here, and I suspect this is where the disagreement on dodginess comes from.
I also think there’s conflation here between knock-offs that do in fact violate IP laws which isn’t just dodgy but a violation of the law. And knockoffs that take the same general form or appearance of branded goods—with or without the same level of quality.
I agree that this is happenong in these comments. I also think that the people who support IP laws are more likely to find legal yet adjacent actions dodgy -- if you didn't support physical property laws you might find taking an legally abandoned yet possibly lost item dodgy, whereas somebody who doesn't believe in physical property laws is unlikely to have any objection to this.
The law doesn't grant clothing designs the same IP protections that other creative works enjoy, which makes it much easier to knock off fashion without facing legal challenges.
Why is it necessary to precede a question with 'serious question'? (Meaning why do people reading comments assume a negative (snarky) unless otherwise pointed out the question is 'serious'. Likewise why when mentioning something which is generally viewed in a negative light (but defending it) is it needed to say 'I hate spam as much as anyone but'.
Well now I have no idea if you’re asking a serious question! To give a serious answer, it seems like most questions on forums like these are often not real questions, but rhetorical.
- generally low quality (if you're borrowing another brand's image, you have little incentive to keep it high quality, and high incentive to compete on price as much as possible)
- it's not the most moral thing copying someone else's work
if youre a smaller company making a product profitably and amazon sees this and duplicates your product to sell for less, they are able to do this only because of their gargantuan size. this only serves to further consolidate a market into a ever smaller tract. if you have no problem with monopolies or the business processes that create them, then sure, it isnt messed up at all. otherwise, yeah, its a dodgy business practice.
Look at Zara. Without patents on clothing design, Zara often copies the latest catalogs from luxury designers and gets them to mass markets even before they do. From an operational standpoint its a great company. Thats why its worth billions of dollars and its the greatest retailer in Europe, and probably in the world.
There are three kinds of patents: utility, design and patent [1]. For example, the Apple Samsung lawsuit was over a design patent [2]. Design patents are good for 14 year.
The bigger problem here is that Allbirds ISNT a luxury brand.
They've drank the Silicon Valley cool-aid of growth above all else, the "reforge" growth-hack school of tips and tricks to optimize conversion rates and customer retention, without actually building a storied brand - which is what a real luxury brand is (see: LVMH's holdings, Hermes, or more recently Aesop).
There's no storied history, hell - their LOGO isn't on their products. They're PERFECTLY ripe for generic disruption.
If they had hired real brand marketers, not growth addicts over-analyzing CAC/LTV/AOV formulas all day, they'd have a more defensible position in the marketplace.
By the way, your analogy of sunglasses is flawed - those cheap sunglasses look, feel, and function cheaply.
> The bigger problem here is that Allbirds ISNT a luxury brand.
Sure, perhaps I should have said they price themselves like a luxury brand (or something above commodity pricing but below luxury? I'm not an expert on this stuff)
From their marketing on sustainability, and their prices, it seems to follow to me that they probably have a high markup and don't ruthlessly cut corners to survive on a tiny margin at brutally low prices.
> By the way, your analogy of sunglasses is flawed - those cheap sunglasses look, feel, and function cheaply.
Admittedly I wrote my post under the assumption that Amazon's generic wool runners probably feel cheap in one way or another from having cut some corners to lower production costs. I wouldn't know, though.
Luxury isn't necessarily about price (although it's a common component) - it's an ephemeral combination of prestige, exclusivity, quality, and wealth/taste projection.
If you can't succeed because somebody made a low effort, low quality copy of your product, then you don't deserve to make money. Especially in light of the fact that Coke has been around for 150 years and is essentially just sugar water.
Amazon has copied 50,000+ items, some open source, some proprietary SaaS, they surely weren't all garbage undeserving of success. Predatory platforms might be the actual problem.
The 50,000+ items are physical things across their many brands, they're facing an antitrust action in the EU for the possibility sales data is the deciding factor for what to copy.
I mean, the law itself doesn't say only Coca-Cola can use the coca leaves.... they just have an exclusive deal with the only company that is licensed to import it.
Does that sort of regulatory capture accomplish the same effect though? If you're a competitor in the space, you'd either a) not have any access to an ingredient you want, or b) would have to go through the trouble of finding a new company to import it AND get them licensed (which I assume is likely a difficult thing to do).
To an extent, the barrier to entry could end up so high that it's effectively _as if _ Coca-Cola has a legal stranglehold.
The specific flavor/process of coke is protected, but you can get pretty close outside of that. Their other products are often indistinguishable (e.g. sprite/sierra mist). The value there is the brand, not the specific flavor.
The special dispensation for Coke works on a branding level: "we have a special process dating back to 1890".
I'm not sure if this is how you're defining brand, but the real value is in their exclusivity agreements with restaurants and (some) grocers.
This is the reason any restaurant that doesn't just resell soft drinks they bought at the grocery store only sells either Pepsi / Coca-Cola.
It would be really interesting to see what kind of rates major chains/conglomerates (E.g. McDonalds, Subway, 3G, Recipe Unlimited, etc.) get for their soft drinks as these guys are big enough that they can probably push their own soft drinks and really bite into Coca-Cola/Pepsi's turf.
FWIW, the exclusivity agreements only work because they interact in a virtuous cycle with the incredible amount of effort Coca-Cola has put into building their brand with consumers. Nobody signs exclusivity agreements with PC Cola[0].
What if the person who copies you also controls the marketplace, and prioritizes their copy above your original? That seems much closer to what Amazon is doing.
No different than Walmart prioritizing their store brand which explicitly copy the branding of other products ("woah, there's no way that isn't butter"). If you cant get your customers to seek you out directly then you don't have a brand.
As a consumer I like when store brands do this. It tells me what they're trying to impersonate more than the "compare to XXX" in teeny tiny print. But they're just a brand like anything else on the shelf -- Kroger pretzels are better than Rolled Gold, but their sandwich cookies are much worse than Oreo.
I did a search on both Amazon.com and Amazon.ca but couldn't find any Amazon Basic shoes that matched Allbirds. I also didn't listen to the podcast, so I must have missed it.
I largely agree with your point but I think your example could have been better, companies like CC but a better example would be Red Bull could easily be switched out for a cheap clone and not suffer much in revenue, Red Bull has no superior quality but it's the brand that sells.
> Coke has been around for 150 years and is essentially just sugar water.
Coke is still around (primarily) because of tremendous money spent on marketing and tremendous money spent on owning the channel of distribution of their products (where 'own' means defacto by how they operate).
This is a very simplistic view. (a) Patent litigations can cost a lot of money, and small companies might not be able to fight big ones. (b) Some products are more easily patentable than others. The current situation is definitely not great for innovation or creativity.
> Amazon is known for watching what retail products gain traction on its platform and elsewhere and then creating similar products it can sell for less.
Should we really care? Isn't this what consumers want? Value.
Allbirds shoes look very very cheap. I stopped into their NYC store downtown twice. Each time I noticed a ton of glue that had seeped onto the wool when they glued the fabric on. I thought the first time it was a one-off issue. The pattern continues. Allbirds really needs to step up their quality. If you look at the product quality of Merrel, Danner, US Made Red Wing Shoes, it's night and day! I would never buy an Allbird.
You're comparing work boots to what are effectively wool slippers with rubber soles - of course there's a difference in quality because they're not even the same market segment.
I agree with you they're overpriced, but not for the reasons you stated.
Maybe they should aim for a different market segment then. Common Projects, a plain but very well made luxury sneaker seems to be doing well. I'd imagine fighting for scraps against Amazon/Walmart isn't going to go well.
Their market is well off techies/tech adjacent people that don't care about fashion and just want to be comfy (Allbirds are the butt of jokes in any men's style community).
They can't price their shoes too high because their market would scoff at paying more than $~150 for shoes. This market also won't care about where the material is sourced from or who makes it.
Allbirds made a cheap product people can easily copy, so they did. Shrug.
I had a pair of Allbirds and they were super comfy and breathable but the soles were dangerously bad. Walking around in slushy weather they were like ice skates causing me to slip and fall more than once. I know they're not winter boots but even a pair of regular sneakers were 100x better.
Abstractly, the question at hand is this: is a retailer that sells its own in house brand anticompetitive due to the information it has on potential competitor sales?
Other large retailers: Target, Walmart, etc. have a higher percentage of in house brands for sale than Amazon. So on this argument going after Amazon means you need to decouple retailers from in house brands across the board.
Even the concern about search placement has concerns, as shelf space in the store can be viewed as a analogous to search pages.
I think most people don't know that shelf space is actively sold by the stores. They imagine the stores go out and find the best products to display. That's not what happens.
Yeah, the person above you makes it sound like stores just have giant Dutch auctions for space when it's more like negotiating terms to a contract after they've already passed other qualifying steps.
Sure they would. Apple has shown that they have no problem with human rights issues in their supply chain despite pushing a pro-human rights image in their marketing. They're a gigantic multinational company, their goal is to make money. Other concerns are secondary and prioritized in accordance with how they support that primary goal.
The relevant thing to consider is that Apple likely wouldn't do it for an amount of money that was anything resembling a good deal for Amazon.
This really depends on the retail methodology of a company. Space allocation in a category planogram (layout) is often ultimately decided by the category manager (corporate person who is responsible for P/L of that category), but can be affected by the heavy hitters in that category using their internal "retail services" department to help said category manager formulate their planograms. This usually results in somewhat biased product assortments and layouts that give preferential treatment to specific brands, but rarely is space outright purchased within the aisles of a store.
End-caps are a different story, but often the "purchase" of an end-cap simply takes the form of wholesale pricing concessions, which allow the store to make more money by promoting those products for a short period of time. Historically, some DSD brands will lease end-caps at stores (speaking specifically about supermarkets in this context), but these are serviced and stocked by external companies. Depending on the marketing strategy of a chain, private label products are often placed on end-caps to drive volume for what are often their highest-margin products (due to heavy control over the whole supply chain) and are not subject to any purchasing.
TL;DR:
The extent to which retail stores "sell" shelf-space is often exaggerated, a kind of folk wisdom that may have been more truthful in the past but doesn't reflect modern business practices.
The retailer is looking to maximize its own profit. It's not going to put a totally DOA product on the shelves, but they do charge slotting fees to allocate shelf space for products. There's always a large set of products they could put there, so those slotting fees end up being a major source of margin for the stores.
I think if you look at Warby Parker as a comparison, it's easy to see that Allbirds value is in buying into their brand. There were / are plenty of companies selling cheap glasses, but it took Warby Parker making them cool. I do think Allbirds should get a lot of credit for innovating in such a crowded space, but people buy Allbirds for way more than just the shoe. Walk into any one of their stores on a Saturday or check out their packaging and it seems obvious their customers are not choosing them based on price.
It certainly does seem to be anticompetitive to (1) own the market, (2) collect the data about the market, and (3) actively use that data to replace or compete with third parties on the market. As per a comment below[1].
If this is anticompetitive then many brick and mortar stores are in trouble. Go into any large grocery store and popular items will almost always have a store brand equivalent prominently displayed and discounted next to the name brands.
I own a pair of all birds. I think I paid around $100 for them. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual cost of the shoe was around $8.
Amazon is a margin-eating business("your margin is my opportunity"). You can't expect margins like that to just go on unmolested from anyone. I'm honestly surprised Amazon hasn't done more of this - e.g. in the makeup industry which has notoriously high margins.
This is why I stopped selling on Amazon. It's compelling because there's a built-in customer base. But in the long-run, they will use your selling data against you and eventually attempt to put you out of business by finding a cheaper supplier.
We have built a good business selling on Amazon in a product category where the competition (including Amazon Basics) is half of our price. If all you bring to Amazon is something that is undifferentiated and can be easily copied, then it'll be a race to the bottom and you'll lose to factories in China selling direct or players like Amazon who can achieve massive economies of scale.
My problem is when the oligopolies hurt the market with these practices.
I used to buy boxes of nitrile gloves from Home Depot for painting. Then they started carrying 'HDX' brand nitrile gloves. Then they stopped carrying all other brands of nitrile gloves.
I'm not sure the practice is the problem, or the oligopoly. I would shop somewhere else, but where am I going to shop? Lowes?
I'm not going to defend Amazon or capitalism as much as others in the comments, but Allbirds are fairly cheaply made shoe sold at a high price to well off tech workers or tech-adjacent workers. It was only a matter of time until someone that can eat the margin (Amazon) stepped in.
This is what happens when the internet is essentially taken over by the walled gardens of "platforms" where the only choices you have are the ones your masters in charge of the platform you have subjugated yourself to allow you to have.
Amazon has plenty of dodgy business practices, but I don't think this is one of them.