Last week was my introduction to the term "generic" as it applies to something you buy somewhere other than a drug store. I don't know why generics should be bad when I actually ingest several drugs every week that are going by that title. I have the idea that generic drugs are controlled by someone, but now I'm not sure that is true. I know it isn't true for generic IP cameras.
I opened a "generic" IP camera from Amazon without realizing that was what I had ordered. After I had returned it, I went back to see what the manufacturer said about their product. The listing on Amazon says "generic" clearly enough, and searching for the title will give a person a list that is 400 pages long. They are such things as covers for iPads, headphones, chargers and lots of similar items. Almost all are made in China. So, I am thinking, what is the harm in that?
The camera worked and it only cost a little over $35. It had "documentation" of sorts, that was in some kind of English that reminded me of the way Japanese documentation was written in the early days of them opening up their markets to the U.S. But, something in the documentation got my attention. It said something like this: if this camera comes without a label that contains identifying data, it might be a counterfeit. It had a few stickers on it, but none of them had the identifying data I was looking for.
What, I was thinking, was a counterfeit generic? Justice, I think. It is ironic that the Chinese have to worry about having counterfeits substituted for their own products, since they are the ones doing most of the counterfeiting in the world. They have even done airbags recently.
This camera may have been a counterfeit of a generic and I asked the folks at Amazon about that. They were nice. They said, "Send it back" at almost every turn, but I don't think they were getting where I was going with the idea that a counterfeit generic could exist in the world.
After thinking about it for a few days, I have changed my mind about the whole process of allowing "generics" into any world, including drugs. You can't return a generic to the place that made it, since the place is not identified. Amazon took it back, but they didn't make it. You can't even identify where it was made. How do I know the stick-on labels that say FC on them really mean anything related to the testing of the device for its compliance with U.S. electrical standards? If the camera is counterfeit, the labels probably are too.
It wouldn't work with the software it came with, so I was going out to download the latest version. What is the website for Generic? Now I was starting to see the point of the term generic. Nobody is responsible for the thing once it is sold. What do I do if it isn't someone like Amazon? With 400 pages of items on Amazon alone, how many of these things are there? Why do we let them into the United States to begin with? Why do we allow resellers to sell them? I will be asking someone in the Commerce Department in the next week or so... In the meantime, I located another IP camera that does what I want. It cost $129.95, but it has the name of the company that made it on the side of the box. That one didn't.
