Taiwan's National Palace Museum calls on Taobao to boycott copycat gadgets

Tape printed with the royal script of Emperor Kangxi is one of the best sellers at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. [A screen shot of Taobao] 

Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) would never have imagined that more than 100 years later, his red ink royal script would have been so popular among the masses, neither does Taiwan's National Palace Museum, which made it all possible.
What the museum had also not anticipated was that one year after it introduced the "emperor gadget", it has to go out of its way to guard copyright of the gadget against widely available copycats being sold online. 

The gadget the museum is guarding - a type of adhesive tape with Emperor Kangxi's red ink 朕知道了(Zhenzhidaole, meaning the emperor has got the knowledge of an incident or a fact without approval or objection) on it - sold 500 copies a day after it came out. 

The tapes then came up against rival e-business dealers flooding the online Taobao shopping mall and selling copies. Prices offered ranged from less than 4 yuan (about $0.6) to 40 yuan (about $6), competitive compared with the original 60 yuan (about $9.4). 

The tape is not the only creative souvenir item to have been copied. According to Jiang Naixin, member of the Taiwan Legislative Council, other popular items such as the green and white jade cabbage and the jade Tung-Po meat were also found to have forged counterparts at a bargain price on Taobao. 

To combat the possible cash drain from annual sales, which reached 160 million yuan (about $25 million) last year, the National Palace Museum appealed to lawyers to deal with copyright infringements. 

"We have set up an intellectual property rights protection group, and we have entrusted a lawyer to look at infringement cases since last year," said Feng Mingzhu, director of the National Palace Museum. Feng said that so far there have 250,000 suspect infringed items, with 32 confirmed. 

"Most of the infringed items were sold on the mainland, and we have sent letters to dealers to remove those items from shelves."
Removing the copycats is no easy task. As Feng admitted at the Taiwan Legislative Council last month, even though the museum has tracked down the copycat items and reported to the Standards Bureau, across the straits lawsuits are too costly to afford. 

"Mainland visitors account for about 30 percent of the visitors to the National Palace Museum, and 40 percent of sales. They can appreciate the cultural connotations in our designs, and we hope they can buy the authentic ones," said a National Palace Museum spokesperson. 

As reported, the National Palace Museum has been devoted in the inheritance and innovation of the antiques since the 1960s. The museum made duplicates of the antiques but it was not until 2000 that the museum began to add innovation in the items, making them more up to date and appealing.