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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;all_fakes, post: 129434, member: 55&quot;]To add my views on this discussion:</p><p>It is important to understand how the carving of souvenir items works in Indonesia, for one.&nbsp; Representatives of foreign corporations visit, bringing photos of items from cultures around the world.&nbsp; They recruit local families to carve replicas and fakes based on the photos.&nbsp;&nbsp; They pay in pennies.&nbsp; They export the items to the US and other countries where they are sold at a markup of perhaps 1000%</p><p>The final market is dishonest dealers who represent the items as genuine artifacts, antiquities, and in so doing violate numerous criminal statutes.</p><p>&nbsp; &nbsp; The Indonesian carvers are victims in this; this enterprise undermines their own culture, because there are genuine Indonesian masks and culture which they could be involved in, and where they could probably make more money.&nbsp; If nothing else, they can (and do) make items for sale in the import market without producing fakes of any sort; decorative, hand-carved items which one sees everywhere.&nbsp; But the enterprise helps keep them in poverty.</p><p>&nbsp; &nbsp; And the cultures being imitated are harmed also; the members of those cultures deserve to make a living, and their ability to do so is undermined, not by the Indonesian carvers, but by the greedy corporations who victimize them.</p><p>It is important to keep things straight.&nbsp; Nobody benefits from a business based on fraud except the corporations committing it.&nbsp;&nbsp; The victims are both the real artists around the world whose intellectual property is being stolen, and the families in Indonesia who are conned into wasting their time on fakes.&nbsp; The crime lies not in hiring them to make carvings, but in recruiting them to carve fakes.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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