> If I’ve gotten counterfeits they were certainly of the quality i was expecting from the brand name and I really don’t care, that’s the free marketplace baby, capitalism at full health.
A free market, by definition, has full transparency; if you can unwittingly get a counterfeit, it's not a free market.
A counterfeit is meaningless in a free market—intellectual property is an unnecessary constraint on the market to incentivize production of goods.
A brand is just a label, immaterial to the quality of the received commodity. The term I would use for folks who buy an expensive item, sight unseen, and expecting proportional quality, from a third party market is “sucker”. Regulating counterfeit sales will just keep prices high and competitive pressure low, fucking us all over.
Why not simply regulate the quality of the item and force brands to compete on things that matter? Say, require phones to have offer a version with a headphone jack so you aren’t forced to shell out endless money for dongles and bluetooth sets every X years.
A free market, by definition, has full transparency; if you can unwittingly get a counterfeit, it's not a free market.