Pirates and Publishers by Wang Fei-Hsien;

Author:Wang, Fei-Hsien;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

Copycats

Copycatting was a common problem in early twentieth-century Shanghai when urban consumers were suddenly exposed to a wide range of new commodities and services. The front pages of Shanghai’s major newspapers were frequently full of advertisements published by anxious booksellers, patent medicine manufacturers, and even insurance companies, condemning cunning copycats. They urged consumers to carefully identify bona fide trademarks and authorized retailers to ensure the authenticity of the products they bought. In the view of the SBG, copycats producing counterfeit titles that could mislead or confuse readers were an exceptionally abominable type of piracy, because copycats compromised not only the exclusivity of the genuine products but also the credibility of the brand name.

For some booksellers, protecting their brand was more important than recovering the profit lost to piracy. In October 1907, for instance, the Editorial Department of the Scientific Society (Kexuehui bianyibu) reported to the SBG that there was a copycat calling itself the “Scientific Editorial Institute” (Kexue bianyiju), which was very similar to their name in Chinese. This copycat, they stated, had published a mathematics textbook entitled Suanshu jiaokeshu quanzhang (Full textbook of arithmetic), which was a pirated edition of their Chen Wen suanshu jiaokeshu (Chen Wen’s arithmetic textbook). The names of the two firms and the titles of these two books were so similar, they claimed, that their business had been noticeably affected, and the sales of their books were down. In response to the SBG’s inquiry, the copycat admitted that they had plagiarized the Editorial Department of the Scientific Society’s books; they agreed to surrender the remainders and the shudi master copy of this title to the guild.62

But this was not what the Editorial Department of the Scientific Society wanted. Burning all the remainders wouldn’t rehabilitate their brand name, which they considered to have been corrupted and compromised by the copycat. To restore this victim’s reputation, the SBG then demanded that the “Scientific Editorial Institute” pay two hundred yuan in compensation for the damage they had done. The guild used half the money to publish a public announcement on the front pages of Shen bao and Eastern Times, two leading newspapers in Shanghai, for three consecutive days. In this statement, the SBG declared that the “Scientific Editorial Institute” had confessed to being a copycat, and then endorsed the Editorial Department of the Scientific Society as the “authentic” entity.63 So pleased were they by the SBG’s announcement, the Editorial Department of the Scientific Society decided to donate the compensation they received from the copycat as an extra contribution to the guild.64

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