“The Year of the Cloned Products” – Vincent Laforet – ON THE GO – episode 46

by Nino LeitnerMay 8^th, 2017

Stay away from counterfeit products: Straight talk with Vincent Laforet in this episode of ON THE GO. 

Vincent Laforet and Nino Leitner “On the Go” for cinema5D.

“Innovation is being destroyed”

In this year’s first episode of our car talk show ON THE GO, I talked to commercial director / photographer and DSLR pioneer Vincent Laforet about the state of the industry.

Vincent identified a dire state in gear manufacturing, with more and more innovative products being ripped off by (mainly) Asian counterfeit products. To make matters worse, some of those clone companies aren’t small operations, they are becoming huge international players. What’s left for the innovators is to go to court, which isn’t easy – not even having expensive patents necessarily protects you from counterfeiters, if you don’t have the financial resources to fight against them in international courts. And even if you do, particularly Chinese companies are still often hard to grasp legally from Western countries.

We talked in particular about a high-profile clone of the MoVi Pro which has been announced just before NAB, which upset Vincent in particular as he was the person who launched the MoVi M10 together with his friends from Freefly a couple of years ago.

Check back next week for another episode with Vincent Laforet, in which he will talk about how it is to shoot commercials for Apple, where his career is moving and where he expects things will go in the coming years for him and the industry.

Do you care if you have “the original” of a product if it works better or is price all that matters to you? Let us know in the comments below!

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