Gente

The full page article published on the no. 52 of the weekly magazine Gente (in English ‘People’), which came out in Italy at the end of 2015 and was in newsstands until the beginning of January 2016, talks about the bureaucratic and legal battles of the designer and entrepreneur Raffaele Iannello in his daily fight against counterfeits. The title: “Help, I create… they destroy me”. The abstract sums up the entire matter: “Raffaele Iannello is a world famous designer. But his designs are regularly counterfeited and, because of lawsuits to assert his paternity and report ‘copycats’, he risks bankruptcy”. The article, written by Raffaella Case, then continues with a description of how the designer’s most famous work, the Voodoo / The Ex knife set, is for sale all over the world as a counterfeit even though several international companies have already been convicted in courts.
This article came after an analogous article which came out a few weeks earlier in the Corriere della Sera the largest Italian newspaper.
After these journalistic publications, published several years ago, the situation has improved slightly… new legal proceedings in the meantime have concluded (all obviously convicting dishonest sellers and fully recognizing the rights of the designer) and now the counterfeits have considerably diminished, even though they haven’t completely disappeared.