Ferrari is a particularly litigious company. One of my good friends who is an independent Ferrari mechanic got a C&D from them for having the image of a Ferrari dealer sign show up when you searched him on Facebook. He didn't even post it. It was a local driver's group who tagged him in the post for an event that was sponsored by said dealer. He briefly tried to engage with their lawyers and explain it really had nothing to do with him, but was basically told they would bankrupt him unless he complied with their wishes to take down the Facebook post that wasn't his. They have harassed him in the past for advertising that he fixes Ferraris, even though it has been settled law for decades that this is legal.
I can't imagine they're making their money on unit sales, and Ferrari merchandise isn't exactly flying off the shelves... so where else do they make money?
Their 2022 net income is 1 billion on 5 billion revenue, with that i think your imagination is just wrong. Ferrari is public and not a part of a larger car company.
In the article’s body, one paragraph is present twice, the second time paraphrased. Was that because of some AI tool? Or perhaps wrong Ctrl+V during editing? Interesting in any case.
> “It is a rather unusual fact that an intellectual property case ends up in criminal proceedings ,” the businessman’s lawyer, María Muiño González, told El Pais. The defense has spent three years “analyzing the ins and outs of the brand” and maintains that the accused “never wanted to appear to have a real Ferrari.” “The emblems were crude and you could see that they were simple stickers,” she explains, “and I wasn’t going to sell it either; “He had it in his possession for only 12 days until it was seized.”
> “It’s quite unusual for an intellectual property case to escalate into criminal proceedings,” noted the businessman’s lawyer, María Muiño González, told El Pais. The defense team invested three years in closely examining the brand and firmly asserted that the accused never had any intention of making the vehicle resemble a genuine Ferrari. “The emblems were crude, and you could clearly see that they were basic stickers,” she said. “Furthermore, there were no plans to sell it; he had it in his possession for only 12 days before it was seized.”
Interesting. Both versions seem to have structural/grammatical errors in different places, and both feel machine-generated. Curiously, the different wording of each version also affects what's supposed to be direct quotes, which makes me irrationally angry for some reason. I think because once you allow yourself to paraphrase quotations that you'll have readers believe are verbatim, you may as well make them all up.
El Pais is a well knownand reasonably reputable Spanish newspaper; at a tier equivalent to the New York Times or Wall Street journal in the US. It is unlikely they are producing AI fabrications of this sort.
Is this going to be the new, "I can tell it's a shop by the pixels?"
Many articles repeat the main premise for effect. It's a common journalism technique to highlight the main point of the article. Often the rest of the article is simply fluff around to increase the content length with the main premise being repeated for emphasis.
TFA is also messing up the Ferrari models: they say the car dealer copied the Ferrari F430 and they show a picture of a real F430 to illustrate that but then the link to the Ford-based replica shows an attempt at recreating a 458 instead (and the URL even contains 458 in its name).
I'm not clear on what legal grounds Ferrari could even make a claim here. The owner of the custom made look-alike car didn't create the car and never tried to sell the car. If Ferrari could prove that the car was substantially similar enough to infringe on their trademarked design AND likely to cause confusion, they might be able to impound the car and have it destroyed, similar to fake Rolex watches or Mickey Mouse t-shirts. But collecting punitive damages or prison time seems crazy. Maybe Spanish law is weirdly different but most western nations generally conform to WTO standards around IP. I suspect we're not getting the whole story here.
I have never heard of any company being able to impound fake products from the end consumers either. It's possible they have never tried, but normally they are only seizing product en masse from people selling it.
> I have never heard of any company being able to impound fake products from the end consumers either.
Try importing a fake Gucci bag that you bought cheaply at Patbong Road in Bangkok to Italy. It won't only be impounded you'll also be hit with a fine in the 1000s of Euro. Same in France.
Other countries may not be that excessive but you can be sure that your fake Rolex is toast when they catch it at customs.
Sure, it's not the companies impounding the fakes but customs on their behalf.
WhistlinDiesel has enough money to fight them on it, would fight them on it, and would make money doing it. The dorks at Ferrari that do this lawsuit trolling knew it would probably blow up in their face if they tried anything.
WhistlinDiesel turns controversy into ad revenue. The ad revenue from such a suit would allow him to remain in court pretty much indefinitely, but Ferrari doesn't have that luxury. He's also the same guy that burned up a Ferrari bombing it through a harvested field, so being "reasonable" (as a lot of people would define it) isn't really his thing. There's no scenario where this doesn't result in a lot of egg on Ferrari's face if they actually went after him for it.
Burned two cars down by driving hard to the point of exhausts going red hot and then stopping in a field filled with easily flammable straw. All for clicks.
I've heard of the company going after people from modifying their cars and not just strikes me as wrong. If you buy a Ferrari, you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it.
You should tell that to the tech people. They have a thing named DRM and they may "go to jail" if they try to modify even the software not to mention the hardware. They are treated like criminals.
> You should tell that to the tech people. They have a thing named DRM and they may "go to jail" if they try to modify even the software not to mention the hardware. They are treated like criminals.
In my experience many tech people are quite opposed to DRM, and of those who do have the skills to develop tools for circumventing DRM mechanisms (which is of course only a small fraction of the tech people), there exist quite a few people who actually do invest a good deal of their free time to secretly develop such semi-legal tools.
Every time I see a conflation between "executives at giant companies in the tech industry" and "actual tech/engineering workers", somehow it always seem to be to protect the former.
It's weird, imagine if the actions of McDonalds was supposed to reflect "the fast food people", or the action of Disney was supposed to reflect "animators", etc.
To my knowledge the difference that allows that is that you license the software, you purchase the car.
You can purchase software, it's just not the common case. Companies but other companies and parchase the software that they developed along with that, and scammers purchase the software of popular browser extensions so they can use them against the existing user base (which are licensed, even if implicitly).
Evem with open source you're almost always using software under a license. For the vast majority of people, the only software they'll ever actually own is something they wrote themselves.
When you purchase a car, you're not allowed to build copies of that car and sell them. You purchase the design of a car the same way you purchase a copy of software. You own the physical storage the software comes on, the same way you own the physical metal, rubber, and plastic of the car, but the design isn't yours.
Why are we allowed to look under the hood of a car we buy and even install our own modifications, but when we purchase software? Why can we alter and replace metal frames, but not alter the storage cells on our phones and computers?
My understanding is that you are allowed to sell copies of a car, as long as you don't advertise it as the thing you're copying, except for anything that is patented, for which you need to get a license. That's the point (or one of them) of a patent, to prevent people from making legal copies for a time period as a reward to the inventor and promote invention of novel things.
Isnt that what this was about? The very bad Ferrari stickers instead of emblems worked in favor of the person sued, but if there was something indicating it absolutely wasn't a Ferrari there wouldn't have been any question at all.
In case of Ferrari what you can do with the car is quite restricted. They even restrict car resales or any modifications. I'm not sure by what legal means, but you're probably signing some contract that is far reaching.
I am not sure how Ferrari enforces it but since customers are in need of official servicing, Ferrari has plenty of ways to enforce their rights. They can just refuse servicing the car or selling parts to the unacknowledged second hand buyer which can reduce the value greatly.
Patents, trademarks, and copyright can all be issues with making duplicates of something.
Making and selling “Fake” handbags which you make really clear are fakes can result in prison. The concern are twofold, someone buying it may try and resell the items as “real” or someone seeing a poor copy with another brands trademark on it can dilute the brand.
This is less of a concern if the item looks nothing like any of the actual products and isn’t being sold. Tie-dying a 5$ tote bag and stenciling Chloé, Burberry, Gucci, and a few other brand names at the same time is clearly not trying to be a fake.
> Making and selling “Fake” handbags which you make really clear are fakes can result in prison. The concern are twofold, someone buying it may try and resell the items as “real” or someone seeing a poor copy with another brands trademark on it can dilute the brand.
I'm pretty sure the issue there is whether the item itself advertises that it is something it's not, even if you're clear it's not a legitimate copy, and also whether you are doing it in furtherance of a crime.
Making knock off Gucci bags and selling them as fakes when you're sure they're being bought by middlemen to sell as authentic (at least when your main purpose is to sell to this market and they can "prove" it), could possibly make you complicit (depending on what they can show in court). In that specific case, even leaving off any branding (to make it easier for someone to add fake branding later) could possibly be found complicit, if they could prove that it was for the purpose of furthering the crime (as I understand it).
I'm not going to act like companies and prosecute rs don't overstep their bounds/rights/authority, but I think it's pretty clear why some of these cases and laws exist (even if we might think they aren't quite the right response to the problem in some cases).
Because only one person in a million is capable of taking the source code of a commercial software product and modifying it for their own benefit in a useful way.
When you start a new job, do you look at the codebase and immediately think "Ok, I get this, all I need to do is..."?
It's fantasy and wishful thinking to believe that it's even possible for someone to build Windows, MacOS, Photoshop, an AAA game, Chrome(ium), or even a commercial mobile app without a huge learning curve and likely quite a bit of commercially sensitive support infrastructure - never mind make useful changes to them.
Adding some custom features to a car is trivial in comparison.
John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack I was not welcome at the Ferrari dealership because of all the crazy turbo modifications on my cars · Jan 27, 2018 · 9:18 AM
I've hear very similar case approx decade ago, when one small business made extremely ugly cheap doll, which from long distance remembers Russian Cheburashka.
And judge decided, it is bad joke on intellectual property, and forbid its sells in country and pay moral penalty.
What I learn from that case, it is sure important for me, which side I support, but it is extremely bad idea, to try impose my point of view to judge.
You've never driven a proper car, have you. It seems you forgot to mention the usual trope about certain body parts dimensions compensation in your righteous hate
Having owned several Ferraris, and driven quite a few different models, I'm not sure I would classify them as "proper" cars. They're fun, and their pretty, but they're not particularly well built or groundbreaking compared to other sports cars, especially Porsche. And some of them, like the Testarossa, worked much better for me on a poster on my bedroom wall as a young teenager than they do when I'm actually behind the wheel of one. But there is something undeniably alluring about them, even if Ferrari the company is overtly obnoxious.
Can you tell me what makes a car "proper"? I'm curious whether or not my 2007 Toyota Prius qualifies, or if I need to invest in something a little sexier.
Clown cars aren't fun to drive or even watch drive. They're fun when they stop driving and 15 clowns pour out of a car originally intended for 5 people.
