Ray Fisman exposes them:
[A] dirty little secret is that Prada rip-offs can also function as free advertising for real Prada handbags—partly by signaling the brand's popularity, but, less obviously, by creating what MIT marketing professor Renee Richardson Gosline has described as a "gateway" product. For her doctoral thesis, Gosline immersed herself in the counterfeit "purse parties" of upper-middle-class moms. She found that her subjects formed attachments to their phony Vuittons and came to crave the real thing when, inevitably, they found the stitches falling apart on their cheap knockoffs. Within a couple of years, more than half of the women—many of whom had never fancied themselves consumers of $1,300 purses—abandoned their counterfeits for authentic items.
Jenna Sauers rejects the emphasis of the piece:
Counterfeiting is a crime because, yes, theft of intellectual property is actually wrong; but it's also a crime because the production of counterfeit goods generally takes place under atrocious circumstances — even by the standards of the international rag trade, a domain not known for its commitment to worker safety and environmental protection — and because the people who produce, smuggle, and sell counterfeit goods are often the same criminal gangs that control the drug trade and human trafficking.
(Photo from Taryn Simon's project Contraband)
The Dish 