With two of my main inter­ests being per­sonal finance and copy­rights (and wrongs), I always get giddy when the two collide.

Recently, Plon­kee made me think: is con­don­ing (buy­ing) knock off fur­ni­ture com­pa­ra­ble to con­don­ing copy­right theft?

There are quite a few peo­ple who get quite pas­sion­ate about the unde­sir­abil­ity of knock offs. Check out this post on Apart­ment Ther­apy, for exam­ple, where var­i­ous peo­ple chime in about the (rea­son­ably assumed) lack of qual­ity on the knock off and that you should sup­port the designer.

Part of me thinks that that I should think that buy­ing a repro­duc­tion is a bit like con­don­ing copy­right theft. But I don’t. It’s not like peo­ple don’t buy repro­duc­tion Chip­pen­dale, and no one thinks that’s a prob­lem. And, I’m never going to spend £1300 on an arm­chair, no mat­ter how nice it is, even £350 is quite a lot of money, really.