Following Apple some time ago, now Ikea also has its Chinese clone. “11 Furniture”, as it is called, faithfully copied the yellow-blue colours, the minimalistic restaurant design and even the small pencils in its own 10,000m² store in South-Chinese Kunming.
While the outside design of the store does not reveal any link to Ikea, the interior is clearly copied – the only ‘local’ thing is the woked pork replacing the Swedish meat balls.
Only a week ago, the same city had two unofficial Apple Stores closed for lack of an exploitation licence – not for breaking copyright laws. In the same police sweep, three other fake Apple stores were found, but they were allowed to remain open.
“China has made important progress towards protecting intellectual property”, says the city council. The most recent step was including concepts and their ‘look and feel’ in the protection laws – but cases like these clearly demonstrate that the enforcement of these laws is as yet rather flawed – at least. Clearly, too many Chinese still see “copyright” as “the right to copy”.
