Obama and Bl‘o’ckberry
By Dyske June 21st, 2009
This is a Chinese ad I found on Cloned in China blog. At first, I thought this was an ad that a Blackberry retailer in China created, but then I realized that the logo says, “BlockBerry”. Apparently the ad copy says, “Obama has Blackberry, I have Blockberry”.
The shamelessness of this ad and the product is so far-out that it feels like cultural satire in a form of actual product. After all, they could have simply called it “Blackberry”; why bother altering the name? What would swapping the ‘a’ with ‘o’ do in terms of protecting them legally or otherwise? It seems like they swapped them just to poke fun at intellectual property laws, in a similar way Saturday Night Live often obscures curse words just to ridicule FCC regulations.
It would be cool to own one of these. Many people would get a kick out of it.
Andre W. says:
July 7th, 2009 at 10:10 amHey, I am a Chinese.
Behaviours of such can be further shown —only a few that I’ve encountered
NKIE –NIKE
Louis Vutton — Louis Vuitton
KCF —KFC
Slight changes to some famous logo
and much more…
I doubt if these brands are even legal…
P.S. Note the HAFF-COMM in the upper-left. If you translate the Chinese above, it will read Harvard Communications, truth is when people see 哈佛 they always take it as the celebrated university, not HAFF. Another trick.
Vitalka says:
February 12th, 2010 at 10:23 amChinese BlackBerry copy – isn’t so awful. It’s bothering us as Western people, but in Chinese business culture to make a copy of some successful item – is to show a respect to company owner.
Another thing is with copyright law – if they will not change a name – device will never allow to be exported to other countries.
By the way, quality of Chinese BlackBerry copy is very high (especially smartphones with Windows Mobile 6.0). Many people around the world using them and happy…