韓国人よ、現実を理解せよ！

On the counterfeiting side South Korea confiscated 57,005 fraudulent goods domestically last year compared to just 5,363 in 2006. KIPO states on its website that it and the Korea Intellectual Property Protection Association are getting serious about crackdowns. Although offenders have said they are usually back in business after paying a fine. Counterfeiting in the country still very much persists says Kenneth L. Port professor of law at the Intellectual Property Institute in Minnesota. "Korea has been a long-term problem for selling knock-off goods, particularly those from Japan," he says.

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South Korea has been a member of the WTO since 1995 and signed up to several anti-counterfeiting trade agreements. Still, problems persist. "If the agreements have the intended consequences, South Korea knocking-off products should slow or stop," argues Port. "The brakes should have been applied." KIPO and S. Korean authorities did not responded to requests for comment. A recent report where a long-standing Japanese jeans maker, Evisu, lost to a South Korean rip-off scammer because of a technicality does not inspire confidence.

Why so many forgeries? It might have something to do with South Korea's education system says Tariq Hussain author of "Diamond Dilemma: Shaping Korea for the 21st Century." "The education system is the cradle of cheating and bribery, one of Korea's biggest diseases," he explains. "Titles count for a lot in Korea, academic titles even more. So given this excessive focus on such titles, there is an incentive to, well, bend the rules, or even cheat. And occasionally these things are uncovered and lead to the demise of the person involved." Plagiarism in all sectors of eduction is rife he adds.

There is no more vivid case study than that of the high-flying South Korea professor, Hwang Woo-suk. He was spectacularly undone for manipulating cloning experiments in 2005. Currently, two more Seoul National University academics are being accused of falsifying stem cell research in papers submitted to international journals.

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Of course, the country has a rich history of innovation. Koreans claim the first modern metal movable printing presses debuted in the Hermit Kingdom in 1230 AD, centuries before Gutenberg. The claim is that the superior South Korean metal working needed for the new tech made its way to Europe, thus making the West the first to mimic a game-changing technology. (History records no ensuing patent suit, however.)


http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/10/welcome-to-the-republic-of-fakes/