I would call the Rolex/iPod examples fraud, wouldn't you? "Free market capitalism" is only rarely conflated with anarchy. (don't get me wrong, I agree that Intellectual Property is the opposite of "free market")
Do people who buy fake Rolexes think they are real, or fakes? If you go into a jewellery shop and spend a lot of money on a Rolex but it turns out to be fake, then sure, it's probably fraud. But if you buy one out on the street for 10 bucks, then I hardly think it's fraud. But these things are independent of the physical form of the thing sold; it comes down to the understanding of what is being sold, as in a contract of sale, implicit or explicit.
To impress your peers, which is often the same reason you would buy the real item. That is why manufacturers of luxury and designer products try to conflate knockoffs and counterfeits in legislation.
Absolutely. Today. But what I was getting at is if we were to hypothetically do away with IP, what he was claiming was a side effect doesn't seem to be one to me. It seems that if someone pretended to be selling a Rolex, and it was accepted that Rolexes were good, high quality watches produced by the Rolex company, they would be committing fraud.
Who gets to decide what any word means? Why is it special that it's a proper noun? If someone were going around claiming to be jeffool from HN, that'd be a clear case of fraud too, no?
That might have been why it was created, but it's not how it's primarily used today, nor do I think it does that good a job combating "customer confusion". (Remember, even without Ubuntu calling their OS "Windows", Dell customers still sent back Ubuntu laptops complaining they thought they were getting Windows.) Just like copyrights and patents were created to encourage innovators to innovate and share with society--the goal was improving society--that original purpose is lost in the primary uses of IP laws today.