would you knowingly purchase pirated model subjects?

General Discussion General Modeling Discussion
1

Not wanting to hijack an extising thread, have started this up after seeing a discussion on cheap prices found at a vendor overseas concerning 1/35 scale figures. Not mentioning their name as I do not believe in promoting them.

For sure I, just like anybody else, would want to save money whenever possible. The situation with these recasts though, are totally different from say, Italeri reboxing a Tamiya kit (and vice versa) for example.

Pirated copies brings no cash to the original brand/sculpter, it neither rewards their work nor funds future work on new subjects. Literally, you are handing your money to a criminal. What say you?

regards,

Jack

2

I agree Jack. IMHO, handing money to someone who didn’t put forth the time and effort for research and development of that product just doesn’t sound right. The companies like Tamiya, Airfix, etc… need our dollars to develop more great kits and accessories. The more we give to the “pirates”, the fewer new kits we get in the long run.

3

I completely agree! I don’t deal with pirates.

Tom

4

No, I would not knowingly deal with pirated merchandise. Hopefully, I’m intellegent enough to know the difference.

5

I wouldn’t buy model kits off that site either. My wife has bought a ball joint doll off that site in question but the one she bought was a discontinued my the original manufacturer.

6

Never.

7

It can be difficult to tell if something is a ‘knockoff’ right away, but usually a huge price drop is the main give away. Combine that with familiarity with the brand and no mention of said brand on the product page layout, that becomes a dead give away.

Clint, that is an interesting example of something being copied and made available after the original is no longer in production. Being open minded, I think that in a way, is not as bad since it really can’t be counted as a sales loss to the original. Still though, the ‘new’ seller is profiting over someone elses work.

regards,

Jack

8

I totally agree we didn’t know the doll was a recast when she bought it. It even had the original company photos up and so cheap. They claim it’s because they get direct from the factory that makes it so cheap. But once it came it didn’t have the certificate claiming it was authentic and no production number on it either since everyone of them that are made get their own number. If you look at that sight you can get the big Lego sets for as low as $50 but they call them Bego or something like that.

9

I’ve done it. I have been real short on cash and have bought Tiwanese recasts, They are bad quality too.

10

I would not knowingly do it, but i imagine the price differance’s can be tempting. A few years back i bought an 18inch Vinyl Darth Vader figure. I never gave it any thought when i ordered it, it was only after a got it i realised it was a poor knockoff of a Screamin kit.

11

I’m not sure I understand a pirated kit. If a major kit manufacturer uses someone else’s old molds, isn’t there an agreement between the two firms? Otherwise, how does the repopping company get ahold of the molds. I thought pirated kits were people who make RTV casts from a kit and sell resin copies.

12

I am surethats what Jack is reffering to, which is why he said subjects not kits. Though if i recall, didn’t one mainstream company rip of some tamiya armour kits without permission. As you say Don, not sure how youcan do that, unless they can make molds useing the kit as a referance.

13

There is no original molds involved with the pirating situation, and it’s the figure industry that is most vulnerable to this. What happens is the ‘pirater’ will purchase a legit figure(s) and use that as a master to make molds from which lower quality castings are made. Quite often they will display the original boxart on their sales page, but will only send a photocopy of this along with your product in a plain box.

Some people will rationalize that it is fine to buy these since it is lower quality - but they are missing the point. Sadly, threads like this won’t stop the situation, but I think it’s important to make people aware, and it’s up to the individual to do decide what is the right thing to do.

regards,

Jack

14

Generally no.

But I did buy a recast garage kit years ago. Guess the price should have tipped me off. On the other hand the original company hadn’t produced that model in years so it was the only way to obtain it.

And if it’s the distributor in the tread I think you mean Jack I did think about looking at them to see if they sell any Chinese hobby products you can’t normally find in the West. Even if they’re original products I would be still supporting a pirate site if I do buy anything… (sigh)

15

No mold is required to rip off a plastic model kit - all you need is an original kit, and a pantograph machine to do the work of copying the parts to make your own mold. The company you are thinking of is Academy. Almost all of their early 1/35 armor were ripoffs of the corresponding Tamiya kit - M60a3, LVTP, Ford Mutt, etc.

16

I might be guilty too of obtaining some ‘garage kits’ as I’m not that well versed with that scene.

As for supporting a site that hosts multiple vendors (a mix of legit and knockoffs) - well at least the legit ones are getting paid for their original work, or at least I would assume they are?

regards,

Jack

17

If you buy a pirated kit, but you would not have bought the real thing, is any damage done?

18

Hi,

I guess in order to answer a question like this, its probably important to ensure that everyone is talking about the same thing.

For a resin model, I can see that if someone takes an original that someone else develioped and used it to make his or her own molds to cast stuff for resale, that would seem to fit the definition of a pirated kit to me.

As far vacuformed models, I guess if someone were to take parts from an existing injection molded kit or even parts from an existing diescast model, I’m also guessing that that may likely fit the definition of a pirated kit.

And as others have noted if someone directly copies the existing parts of an existing kit to back engineer his or her own molds that can also probably be considered a pirated kit.

However, that leaves alot of other areas uncovered. Specifically, last year I bought a 1/600 scale model of an RN WWII destroyer from a company called Mister Craft in Europe. Leter on some forum I saw some suggestions that this kit was just a copy of an old Airfix kit. As it turned out I had a copy of that kit also in my stash so I took a closer look. At first examination the parts from both kits looked very similar. But as I looked closer I could see several differences as well. In particular, the part tress were laid out completely differently, the Airfix kit was molded with recessed portholes while on the Mistercraft model they were actually molded as “raised” dots on the hull (and their locations varied between kits), and other parts varied in size by a bit (in particular the hull depth aft varied noticeably).

As such, in the end, while it looked like a good case could be made that whoever developed the Mistercraft kit likely was very aware of the Airfiz kit, and chose to break the model into nearly the same general pieces (such as molding the lower superstructure to the main deck ), none of those pieces appeared to be identical between kits.

As such, I’m not fully sure that I would consider this kit to be a “pirated” copy of the Airfix kit, though if the kit uses the same parts breakdown is that some form of “piracy”, or is it just a case of both companies using the same approach for such a small vessel model?

Regards

PF

PS. Here is a previous thread where I had some images of the two kits. http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/7/t/180641.aspx

19

No I wouldn’t. I have been victimized in graphic design in the same way, and it is a crime.

20

No damage to oneself, but that decision to support the criminal just enables them to do more pirating.

regards,

Jack