What is it about then? The sanctity of some countries’ copyright laws? Someone’s artwork being copied? Someone’s copy of someone else’s artwork being copied? I get it, but just where is the line drawn and who gets to decide that?
The only thing that concerns me is an innocent party being ripped off. There’s never a way to prevent this 100% though. A sucker and his money, etc.
All those things and so many more.
Here’s one that doesn’t get mentioned often. And there’s some irony in it, because with my anti-copies attitude, I’ve been accused of gatekeeping.
This is a difficult hobby to break into. There aren’t any guidebooks or price guides. There’s no Casino Chips for Dummies. There’s a crazy amount of knowledge in this hobby that’s simply passed by word of mouth (and sadly, some of the guys with the most knowledge are aging out.)
So it’s incredibly hard for a new guy to know whether a chip is worth twenty cents or twenty dollars. And it’s not like most chips have any kind of provenance. There’s exactly one store in the world, where you could walk in and speak with experts. The only way to know what a chip is, is to learn everything you can about chips, so you can try to identify them and value them based on pictures.
I’ve spent plenty of time explaining stuff to new guys - the differences between the
RHC mold and the
THC molds, the little injection nub on the face of a plastic chip or the edge of a ceramic chip - stuff like that. I WANT to help people get into this hobby.
But these knockoffs make it even more difficult. It Used to be that even if you didn’t know the difference between
THC and
RHC, at least you knew to look for that hat with the cane through it. Not any more. Or those pretty Aria chips - even if you know nothing about molds, you could go to the Chipguide website and see exactly what a $1 or $5 look like, if you want to identify Aria chips. Not any more.
Tl;dr - it’s a confusing hobby and even without malicious intent, these copies, knockoffs, and counterfeits make it a lot more confusing.
Tl;dr2 - I may often be an asshole, but I’m not a gatekeeper.