Lord, forgive me for I have sinned
Growing up in rural New Zealand it's fair to say my early years were not always spent productively. An over-active imagination and an under-utilised wooden spoon meant much of my youth was spent devising ingenious ways of lying, cheating and stealing from all whom I adored. One of my favourite tricks was to offer my younger brother four five cent pieces in exchange for a $2 coin because, I argued, the deal meant he received four coins while I accepted only one.
By the time I reached my teens, I found myself stuffing a banana up the exhaust It wasn't until I started earning an income of my own that my misdemeanours really began to take shape though - for it was then I forsake genuine apparel for cheap knock-offs instead.
My favourite top may have had the words 'Hot Margarined' in place of 'Hot Buttered', my "genuine" Adidas track pants may have had one and a half stripes instead of three but I didn't care - if it looked even vaguely like the real deal then it was good enough for me.
There has been a lot in this magazine about the economic cost the booming clothing counterfeiting industry is having on Australia.
Being such a secretive - yet enterprising - business, there is scant research available which could even offer a best guess at the moral, social and financial implications of such operations.
Diesel recently confessed it spent about $20 million in lawyers' fees trying to protect its brand across Australia in one 12-month period.
If we assume the "brands of counterfeiting choice" spent similarly looking after their neck of the woods then an expensive While I have acknowledged the frustrations felt by brand owners engaged in this seemingly unending battle, until recently I too felt it was a victimless crime. Like most consumers, I reasoned the people who bought fake T-shirts and jerseys were not the type to spend upwards of $180 on a jacket at a genuine retailer anyway - so any impact on said organisations was likely to be minimal.
However, something said by Adidas and Nike really got me thinking. They reasoned that while counterfeiting by its very nature hardly ranked against murder and rape in terms of severity, there were less than seven degrees of separation.
They argued that by selling goods already protected by the Trade Marks and Copyright Acts, these businesses were already indulging in illegal activity leaving it is safe to assume not all of their business practices would be as they should in terms of paying tax and staff entitlements. Assuming this is the case, they would then need to interact with other like-minded operations in order to have their money cleaned. Only 'businesses' further down the slippery slope - such as those who also engage in vehicle conversion or drug pedalling - would be in a position to do so. Yet how long would it be before our counterfeiters began to reason the grass is greener?
The crux of the brands' argument therefore was that if they could educate the consumer to require a higher standard of diligence in terms of trusting the source of their supply - half the battle would be won.
I reckon they may just have had a point.