[NeedMoreTea]

Anker are difficult to gauge, I've a few products of theirs, mostly bought a few years ago, with nothing recent - those have been excellent quality and value. Yet I've also started to notice precisely identical unknown brands for most of their products on Amazon.

So I no longer have any certainty. Are Anker merely badge engineering some random white label product, or are Amazon / Anker just not caring or able to do anything about dozens of clear counterfeits?

[ikeboy]

Are those identical products being sold as Anker, or under different brands? If it's different brands then it's not counterfeit just to make a product that looks similar to another one.

[NeedMoreTea]

There's similar and completely indistinguishable, except for brand name and logo. e.g. their desk lamps, also their mice. Seems to be the case for almost every Anker product I remember looking at recently.

[ikeboy]

Nothing illegal about that unless Anker has a design patent.

[NeedMoreTea]

You don't need a patent to protect a design. There's trademark, copyright and design protections, not just patents.

So maybe Anker are uniquely incompetent in selecting suppliers. Not specifying in the contract with factories not to copy whatever widget they produce for Anker, not registering any of their designs. Yet aside from a) products within the same group ostensibly from different brands and b) same idea but clearly made by someone else, few other companies seem affected. They'll have a few products counterfeited. Not most. It's the sort of thing that might encourage you to be very careful on third, fourth and subsequent products.

I suppose it makes a case to avoid Anker and the identical copies, as clearly inept. Few other companies appear to be quite so afflicted. I'm not convinced it's the answer though. Outside the purely generic: white T shirts, tungsten light bulbs and such, you see very few precisely identical products.

[ikeboy]

You said they were not copying the brand, so it's not trademark infringement nor counterfeit.

You keep using the word counterfeit when it does not apply. Copyright is also not applicable unless there's a work of art printed on the product (like cell phone cases).

Most brands making commodity products don't get protection for the design, because the design isn't that unique. Search for "fast chargers for Samsung" and you'll see tons of chargers identical to the Samsung charger except with a different name. Same for Apple.

Examples:

https://www.amazon.com/Pantom-Adaptive-Charging-Compatible-S...

https://www.amazon.com/Adaptive-Charging-Charger-Compatible-...

https://www.amazon.com/Panmy-Foldable-Portable-Charging-Comp...

https://www.amazon.com/ByCallMax-Adapter-Original-Certified-...

[NeedMoreTea]

There are well known, widely applied design protections that are not patents.

Here's the EU's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design_rights_in_th...

Which protects "the appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features of, in particular, the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture and/or materials of the product itself and/or its ornamentation". It applies if they are novel and/or if they have unique character.

[vinay427]

I appreciated your response but as far as I can tell, they were asking whether Anker is badge engineering generic products or is a victim of counterfeiting, which I think is a slightly different question that I'm also looking for the answer to.

[ikeboy]

The only way it would be counterfeit is if they sell it as an Anker product or print Anker on the product.

My assumption would be that the same factory that makes Anker products is also selling the same designs to competitors - it's also possible that a different factory just cloned it.

Note that even if it's the same factory, they could have different quality control for different clients. So quality can differ even on identical designs.