The genuine ones sell for 68 yuan; even the knockoffs sell at 29.9. The difference is less than 40 yuan. And with a price gap that small, they sold 800,000 fake fridge magnets in seven months, bringing in 16.6 million yuan.
The verdict is in. The main offender, Qian, was convicted of copyright infringement and sentenced to three years and six months in prison, fined 800,000 yuan, and ordered to forfeit 795,000 yuan in illegal proceeds. Eighteen others were part of the same operation. I read through the Procuratorate Daily’s report, then checked the versions from The Paper, Justice Net, and Hangzhou Net. All four sources reported exactly the same figures.
Qian left school after junior high and took odd jobs wherever he could. One October two years ago, he was chatting with two classmates when they got talking about how popular creative cultural fridge magnets had become. They pooled their resources and set up a “cultural creative company.” The company had a special role: product scout. The scouts didn’t need to know about art or history—just what drew traffic. They kept a close eye, day and night, on the data from major e-commerce platforms and official museum shops. Whatever sold well was marked as a “must-hit target.” The Palace Museum’s A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, the National Museum’s phoenix crown, the Shaanxi History Museum’s lady figurines—35 rights holders, 252 products. Not one was spared.
They were quick to make the fakes, too. Employees first bought genuine samples online and sent them straight to contract manufacturers. The products were scanned and modeled piece by piece, saving months of design work. The genuine products used eco-friendly resin; they substituted inferior plastic. The originals were meticulously hand-painted; they used machine printing. They even deliberately blurred the anti-counterfeit mark on the packaging.
The most cunning part was how they evaded consequences. When they received a court summons, they immediately took the products down, paid a small amount in damages, or proactively approached the rights holder to settle privately. Qian and his associates knew the math: civil damages were a drop in the ocean compared with 7.1 million yuan in illegal profits. Those are the exact words of the prosecutor handling the case. The next day, a new store name, new images, and the same counterfeit products were back online. In just seven months, they had 62 franchisees and 290 online stores. The rights holders were run ragged.
My take is that catching the culprits was never the hard part of this case. The Jindong Branch went from opening the investigation to apprehending Qian in just six days. The difficult part was the accounting on the rights holders’ side: 35 rights holders scattered across different places, each needing to establish ownership of their rights—a process that can take years. The price of wrongdoing was laid out plainly: an 800,000-yuan fine against 7.1 million yuan in revenue. That gap still hasn’t been closed.
People in crypto should find this part familiar. Reopening under a new store name is like changing addresses and broadcasting again; settling privately for a small amount is like paying a little fee to make trouble go away. The difference is the ledger. The transactions from 290 online stores were scattered across the back-end systems of different platforms. Prosecutors had to use electronic data systems to piece together the flow of funds from tens of thousands of transfer records. On-chain, every transaction has been publicly visible since the genesis block. It can’t be changed or deleted.
Of course, I’m not going to claim that putting a museum’s phoenix crown on-chain can prevent counterfeiting. To this day, on-chain traceability for physical cultural products has yet to produce a single case at scale, and the National Museum and the Palace Museum are still using the old method of going to court. This is the part I’m uncertain about.
The judgment doesn’t say how much of the 795,000 yuan ordered forfeited was money they hadn’t yet had a chance to spend.
$CHZ $ETH $BTC
#文创冰箱贴 #打假 #国潮 #IntellectualProperty
The verdict is in. The main offender, Qian, was convicted of copyright infringement and sentenced to three years and six months in prison, fined 800,000 yuan, and ordered to forfeit 795,000 yuan in illegal proceeds. Eighteen others were part of the same operation. I read through the Procuratorate Daily’s report, then checked the versions from The Paper, Justice Net, and Hangzhou Net. All four sources reported exactly the same figures.
Qian left school after junior high and took odd jobs wherever he could. One October two years ago, he was chatting with two classmates when they got talking about how popular creative cultural fridge magnets had become. They pooled their resources and set up a “cultural creative company.” The company had a special role: product scout. The scouts didn’t need to know about art or history—just what drew traffic. They kept a close eye, day and night, on the data from major e-commerce platforms and official museum shops. Whatever sold well was marked as a “must-hit target.” The Palace Museum’s A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, the National Museum’s phoenix crown, the Shaanxi History Museum’s lady figurines—35 rights holders, 252 products. Not one was spared.
They were quick to make the fakes, too. Employees first bought genuine samples online and sent them straight to contract manufacturers. The products were scanned and modeled piece by piece, saving months of design work. The genuine products used eco-friendly resin; they substituted inferior plastic. The originals were meticulously hand-painted; they used machine printing. They even deliberately blurred the anti-counterfeit mark on the packaging.
The most cunning part was how they evaded consequences. When they received a court summons, they immediately took the products down, paid a small amount in damages, or proactively approached the rights holder to settle privately. Qian and his associates knew the math: civil damages were a drop in the ocean compared with 7.1 million yuan in illegal profits. Those are the exact words of the prosecutor handling the case. The next day, a new store name, new images, and the same counterfeit products were back online. In just seven months, they had 62 franchisees and 290 online stores. The rights holders were run ragged.
My take is that catching the culprits was never the hard part of this case. The Jindong Branch went from opening the investigation to apprehending Qian in just six days. The difficult part was the accounting on the rights holders’ side: 35 rights holders scattered across different places, each needing to establish ownership of their rights—a process that can take years. The price of wrongdoing was laid out plainly: an 800,000-yuan fine against 7.1 million yuan in revenue. That gap still hasn’t been closed.
People in crypto should find this part familiar. Reopening under a new store name is like changing addresses and broadcasting again; settling privately for a small amount is like paying a little fee to make trouble go away. The difference is the ledger. The transactions from 290 online stores were scattered across the back-end systems of different platforms. Prosecutors had to use electronic data systems to piece together the flow of funds from tens of thousands of transfer records. On-chain, every transaction has been publicly visible since the genesis block. It can’t be changed or deleted.
Of course, I’m not going to claim that putting a museum’s phoenix crown on-chain can prevent counterfeiting. To this day, on-chain traceability for physical cultural products has yet to produce a single case at scale, and the National Museum and the Palace Museum are still using the old method of going to court. This is the part I’m uncertain about.
The judgment doesn’t say how much of the 795,000 yuan ordered forfeited was money they hadn’t yet had a chance to spend.
$CHZ $ETH $BTC
#文创冰箱贴 #打假 #国潮 #IntellectualProperty