U.S. manufactures, continue to face problems protecting their intellectual property from foreign companies, who continue “knocking-off” proprietary designs of U.S. manufacturers. The guilty parties include manufacturers in both China, India and the UK. China poses the biggest threat to these ongoing problems.

Here is how they do it. US companies who own inflatables either send an actual product to a foreign manufacturer to “reverse engineer” the design to build for a cheaper price. Then this new design ends up on a foreign Manufacturers websites being sent all over the world claiming they are the manufacturer of this new inflatable design. Then, the foreign manufacturer steals pictures off the actual USA manufacturers website or catalog to place on their website to “Bait and Switch” their unsuspecting prey, the buying customer.

Now, legally trying to stop this activity with foreign manufacturers is nearly impossible. But, the products that end up in the US being sold by resellers for these foreign manufacturers, are subject to US copyright laws and punishable by the same.

Simply displaying these knock-offs on your website, in your sales literature or bring out in public to be used for a rental, violates the US copyright for that design. The music industry proved that the consumer is not exempt from punishment for stealing intellectual property of artists. They went after individuals that downloaded free music through Napster. All claimed that they did not know this was illegal and claimed ignorance. Not a good defense. These people were fined thousands of dollars for the stolen music.

Rental companies that actually purchase the “real deal” from the original design and manufacturing company of an inflatable product, lose out right along with the manufacturer. They legitimately purchased these inflatables and most likely paid the expensive US labor to build it. Then they are competing with a rental company who maybe paid half of what he would have for the real item, allowing them to capture the rental market in his area by being able to reduce rental rates for that product.

Our advice is this… Beware of any product being sold from a reseller representing a manufacture. Find out who in fact is the real manufacturer of that product. Do some research to see if anyone else carries a product similar to the one you are interested in purchasing. Get the reseller of that product to write a statement to you as to the origin of manufacturing of that product. Make them further attest that they guarantee that this product is not in violation of any US copyrights, trademarks or patents. This gives you some ammunition in the event that you are found to be using a product that is in violation of one of these US laws protecting intellectual property.

Cutting Edge Creations wants the violators to stop this activity, and will do everything in our power to rid the industry of these vultures, whose only interest is in taking what ever they can from the industry without putting back.