Real Beats headphones pictured left, counterfeit pictured right.
Beats headphones do not come cheap as many of you guys have realized by now. However there are some parts of Asia where you can walk into an electronics store and see stacks of Beats headphones retailing for as low as $20 each! How is that possible? Counterfeit products, of course.
However while some counterfeit products are pretty obvious, Beats headphone counterfeits are actually pretty close to the real thing. The packaging is identical and the design and shape of the headphones looks like the real thing too. In fact the counterfeiters didn’t even bother changing the name, so safe to say there have probably been instances where people bought it thinking it was real.
That being said it seems that Beats has had enough and has since filed a lawsuit in China where they are suing a Chinese company for counterfeiting their products. According to the lawsuit (via TMZ), they allege that the company had managed to make $135 billion in revenue from selling the fake headphones.
Naturally Beats is suing to stop the counterfeit products from being made. They have also requested to take over all domain names used by websites that are selling the fake products, along with all the profits that the company had made from the counterfeit headphones. It is unclear how much that would be, but given the reported $135 billion in revenue, it would be a lot.
[Image credit – gongkia2000 @ iLounge]