I was expecting a backlash as this subject is very contentious. I am not justifying my purchase but I am trying to open people minds to the advantages a company gets from having its products copied, rather than just assuming that everyone would have bought the same genuine product instead.
I did say why fakes are not as good although slave labour and money laundering is probably not an issue in this case. I would not buy a new VCDS so RT have not lost anything, so are no worse off. As I explained above they will gain publicity and credibility which helps them much more than me buying a cheaper competitors device.
The logical extension to your argument is that we should only get our vehicles looked at by the manufacturer's and their authorised dealers. Halfords is full of "fake" parts for us to fit ourselves "robbing" car makers of money.
Vcds is itself a kind of a copy of odis, aren't RT robbing odis's developers of money? What about vag-com? Infringing VWs trademark? VW were also going after VCP. I do think it is wrong that the clones are made to look like the originals but at least it is obvious they are clones due to the price difference, so are unlikely to get confused.
2 (possibly) personal examples where pirating can help gps companies, as it did for Microsoft with windows.
1 - after using hacked versions of Sygic gps on phones, the genuine version was bought with a lifetime licence.
2 - being able to update Garmin gps maps when needed without paying for them, meant Garmin sold at least 5 units and soon another one (that will have free lifetime map updates) instead of others such as tomtoms. Both companies in the end made money that otherwise would have gone to their competitors.
If there were no clones and we all started buying Carista, which then became as good as VCDS, what would happen to VCDS?
We shouldn't encourage the use of clones but neither should we get hung up about them and only allow bad things to be said about them.
