February 17, 2012

It took only ten days for New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin to move from unknown Harvard grad to international, cover-of-Sports-Illustrated sensation.   That sent New York Times reporters scurrying downtown to discover whether the sharp-eyed basketball phenom had been paid the highest compliment:  whether his associated products, like jerseys and shoes, had been counterfeited and sold on the city’s notorious counterfeit black market on Canal St.

      Jeremy Lin drives on Isaiah Thomas of the Sacramento Kings

Nope, nothing on Canal St. thus far, this writer can tell you.  Sorry, Jeremy, we still love you.

A quick head fake

But wait, the budding NBA star is not the only player with great court vision.  Counterfeiters in China are used to this and equally ready to find the open man.  Can it be a surprise that on Wednesday, another Times article reported from Hangzhou, China that counterfeiting there had already been going great guns.  ‘“His jerseys have sold out, even including the counterfeit ones,” said Zheng Xiaojun, a 24-year-old clerk in the capital of Zhejiang province, the home of Lin’s distant relatives according to claims in the People’s Republic.

While appreciative of the clerk’s honestly, at the point the article was written there were no “Lin jerseys” so all the articles in the store were counterfeits—known as jiade, or “fake” in China.

(Wondering why an American-born son of Taiwanese parents is such a big hit in mainland China?  Seems that someone there has dug back into the records and found a grandparent of Lin’s, whose background is in Zehjiang province, also the home of a counterfeiting industry which has churned out Lin jerseys in a flash.)

Sports apparel counterfeiting target

NBA and other sports apparel is widely counterfeited, as nearly everyone knows by now.  For years before the iPhone, athletic shoes consistently finished in first place in counterfeit seizures by U.S. government agencies like the  Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE).  It was only last November 28, cyber-Monday, that ICE shut 150 web site domain names for selling counterfeit goods, among which counterfeit sports jerseys figured prominently.  The web sites involved had racked up 77 million hits last year.

     Counterfeit NBA jerseys hang in a China shop window.  Photos via "Cultural    Crossover," blog of an English teacher in Jinan, China, a wonderful culture and basketball blog.

So you can predict that the Lin fakes will reach these shores in a hurry.  And it will not only be jerseys, we can safely say.  Indeed, earlier this week, Nike announced a new shoe for the sudden star, the custom Hyperfuse 2011 PE, which, as footwear site CounterKicks describes it, “…is flavored up in New York Knicks team colors…”  Not yet shipping, but when did that ever stop the counterfeiters?

APDN answer

Is there any answer to this global wave of sports clothes fakery?  The phenomenon may seem a classic case of “too big to solve, too distant to care.”  But in fact that’s far from the case.  Applied DNA Sciences is already authenticating cotton In the U.S. and wool from the U.K.   DNA authentication takes on the big jobs by authenticating the legitimate product, instead of identifying every fake.  That is a flexible and eminently practical way of handling the biggest global housecleaning.  (see for example the tech web site Gizmodo feature on Applied DNA Science "DNA proves your fancy suit isn't a fake").

This blogger also needs to add that counterfeiting of clothing is far from distant, and not a “victimless” crime.  As you can read in other posts--tags below--the counterfeit black market is closely connected to organized crime of all sorts, to terrorism in at least one documented case (the 1991 bombing of the Word Trade Center), and widely uses child indentured labor.  There are good reasons it is against the law.

Meanwhile New Yorkers, enjoy watching your promising new "1."  And Canal St: it's a slam dunk.  #Lin-sanity is coming your way too.