Real names on fake products. China has often faced this problem
in the past thirty years, also in the spirits industry. Fake
bottles with Martell, Johnny Walker and other known names could be
found in shops and in entertainment venues around the
country.
After China became a member to the WTO and become more serious
about IP protection, slowly the cases where infringing copycats
used the real names became lower. It became clearer to infringers
that such copying would mean trademark infringement as most
companies would register the name of their product and the name of
their company as a trademark in China.
What infringers did next: imitating the shape of the
bottle
The question then for these companies was how to still get the
consumer to buy their fake products by making consumers believe
they are buying the real thing. Slowly the names of the
products started to become a bit different. First a difference of
one letter and later more and more letters were
