Chinese online retail giant Alibaba Group seems to want to have it both ways with low-cost knockoff products — simultaneously offering a popular portal for sellers of these lookalike items to reach the world and claiming to be actively cracking down on the sale of these same products. The company’s founder now says one the reasons it can’t just shut off this pipeline of too-similar brand-name apparel and tech products is that these China-made items are now just as good or better than the more expensive products they imitate. [More]
