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by liminalsunset 708 days ago
There are plenty of products which ought to be certified but are not, and plenty of products that probably do not need to be that are.

This is across large and small companies, so I'm going to take a guess and say that in the AliExpress and Temu age, simply mailing the device from China will solve all of your problems.

1 comments

> so I'm going to take a guess and say that in the AliExpress and Temu age, simply mailing the device from China will solve all of your problems.

Your guess would be wrong. The regulatory agencies aren’t inept. They’ll figure out where the headquarters is, not just where the products are being shipped from.

So unless you’re moving the entire company, and your bank accounts, to China and you have a backup plan for what happens when they start seizing your shipments at the border, this isn’t a solution.

Do you actually have an example of something like this actually happening? From what I can tell, at least in Canada, absolutely nothing from China I've bought has ever even been opened for inspection, and it's all tagged as a gift worth ten cents and a battery cover or something inane like that.

Anything from half a kilowatt hours of laptop batteries to miscellaneous electronics has passed through, so I don't think there is any inspection going on at all.

Anecdotally based on the number of things that I see without any FCC ID (tbf you can abuse the SDoC process which is self declared [this is why the CE certification is worthless btw] ), I'm just uncertain the FCC actually does any enforcement. And Amazon sellers are also an example of this not being an issue.

Yep. Fluke, an electrical instrument manufacturer, has a copyright on the look and feel of its handheld digital voltmeters (DVMs). Anyone in the industry will immediately know a Fluke by what it looks like. And they are pretty much the gold standard of handheld DVMs.

Some years ago, a containerload of cheap DVMs from China arrived with a similar appearance, but not made by Fluke. Customs seized the lot and informed them. I forget the details of what happened next, but they were not allowed to be sold in the US since they were in violation of the Fluke copyright.