Italian Authorities Seize Alleged Knockoffs From EICMA Show  By  wheelbender6 (Read 1,184 times)

".......closely resembles......."
Seems to me that as long as they didn't portray it to be a Vespa, or a Piaggo, and still claimed it to be in it's own right, then W T F?
So, if my girlfriend wears a dress that closely resembles one my wife wears, ........................ok, bad example.
Anyway, it wasn't a Chinese clone with a Vespa nameplate on it, so W T F?

aay, Julia roberts married him ???Go figure

Producing under license is quite a bit different than copying without permission. I personally don't know how they get away with blatant copying like they do. It would tick me off if I went through all that is necessary to design a bike and someone stole that design packed the hidden bits with cheapness and sold it for pennies on the dollar compared to my well engineered fine machine. Not sure how one could side with the thieves. I hope the Italians keep it up.

What a great advertising slogan!.... "Our scooters are packed with cheapness"

I got a kick out of how they even included a modification/variation of the Piaggio Blue Logo on the front of the knockoffs.

Zongshen was heavilly mentored by Piaggio and had to do some serious upgrades to their process to get where they are. Piaggio maintains a full time team in China overseeing whats being produced there too however Zongshen is not producing bikes using Piaggio engineering for anyone other than Piaggio. They are however using what they learned from Piaggio to make better GY6 bikes and others of their own design. There was a sudden jump in quality in their own offerings when they started to apply what they learned from Piaggio. I saw some of the new Zongshen bikes at a local dealer and they are better now however none had Piaggio Master or Legend engines in them or anything close to a knockoff of them.

I can understand Piaggio's being very wary of others trying to capitalize on their designs or partnership with Zongshen by making too close a knockoff at least cosmetically lest cosumers mistake those bikes as collaborative or authorised products who's poor quality underneath could undermine the perception of quality that people have of the real Piaggio products.

The chinese bikes have gotten better and better every year. And finding parts is easy for most of them. Compare this to looking for parts for a Honda or a Kawasaki, or Harley motorcycle.

As for Zongshen, I've only seen one bike in person made by them. It was a 250gs. it's a 250cc thumper motorcycle. It looked like a miniature Honda CB650. It was well built and beautiful. If Zongshen get's into bigger bikes and can turn out the quality of what I saw, and they manage to make it reliable and get a good parts, dealer network going, they could give Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, and Kawasaki a run for their money.

So the Italians shouldn't enforce their laws because it wasn't a "good" copy? If the manufacturers broke the law they have to answer to authorities we aren't on the jury...