The bigger problem is with patronizing companies that are not abiding by copyright and intellectual property laws. As examples, we all know KZ just plain stole the shell design for the Zs6 from Campfire audio and Superlux has made direct clones of both AKG and Beyerdynamics products. None of us mistake the Zs5 or Zs6 for a Campfire product or the HD660 for a DT770, but when we purchase these items we are encouraging companies to continue to steal others intellectual property as we are rewarding them financially for doing so. Both Knowles and Sonion have on-going litigation against Chinese manufacturers for patent infringement and at one point Sonion had ask the US Customs department to block all importation of products containing infringing materials. Not sure if that case has been resolved or if it is still in process.
As a regular consumer of Chinese products, what you say might be true, but I still have no idea if it is. My job isn't to get into trade wars over who owns what because that makes buying something too complicated considering I'm in Canada and far away from China where I could do more research to see if something is fake, copied or whatever the case may be. Good luck getting average consumers like myself to spend their time trying everything they can to see if a product is fake before we buy it. It's really almost impossible in the scope of buying something for a couple dollars. I'm not a huge spender and what I buy is usually under $50 and I don't buy very often either.
You're saying that KZ copied this and that and this and that, does the average consumer care? Sure, but do we really want to do the research to see if what you say is true or not? I sure don't. I have enough things that I should be doing already and I probably won't buy the headphones they copied anyway if they did do that. I don't buy very many things. It's really up to online marketplaces and governments to do their due diligence in seeing if something is copyright stolen or not, not the consumer.
Besides, everything I buy in North America could be copyright stolen. This isn't a Chinese problem, it's every country. Do consumers want to spend our lives checking to see if something has partially or fully been 'stolen'? Hell no.
That's the same reason why I'll never be a Vegan, you have to check to make sure everything you do, eat and wear attributes to Vegan principles. I don't have the brain power to be more ethical in terms of being Vegan but I can be almost a Vegan, just not 100%. The same goes for copyrighted products, I can try and stay away from some of them as best as I can, but there's no way I'll spend my whole life researching what is and what isn't. As I said before, that's not a consumer's full-time job, that's the governments of every countries job and they get paid for it too, the consumer does not.
