copyright

Where else can you find a plush doll with the crossover appeal of Goku and Stone Cold Steve Austin other than in the world of bold bootlegs and absurd ripoffs? Where do you find a 2 dollar copy of "Grand Theft Auto 9: Vatican City" other than the marketplace of knockoffs and off brands? Only in this strange land of copyright shenanigans can we find someone with such a desperate need for brand recognition that they would name their store 9 Eleven.

We live in a big world, and not everyone is willing to pay top dollar for "official" merchandise that may or may not be just as good as a knockoff. Yeah, you get a few incomprehensible spellings as well as some terrifying handmade statues of Shrek, but they all make for amazing and ridiculous knockoffs and bootlegs.

No one can really tell the difference if your bag says Gucci or Gercho, so who really cares, you know? Someone else around the corner has bootleg everything, from classic movies to Oreos. It just so happens that only sometimes bootleg and knockoff products become absurd.

Smart business people all around the world have realized that there's money to be made recreating products from well known brands, especially when it's changed just enough to avoid any of those pesky licensing fees. How could that plan go wrong? The results make up some highly absurd off brand and bootleg products.

It's a skill to make an amazing bootleg or knockoff that's close to the original, but not quite close enough that anyone can do anything about it. Companies don't really have to time and energy to go after every single case of copyright infringement and bootleg behavior, so some really good ones slip through. More alarmingly, sometimes it's hard to see what kind of brand recognition they were going for in the first place.

People need costumes and they don't give a damn if they're legit. It takes a precise and creative mind to come up with a costume name that gets the point across without infringing on copyright law. That or, I guess you could just call it "Butt Surprise." Anyway, here are more off-brand costumes that are just legal enough.

Everyone's trying to make a quick buck and we don't blame em for getting as close as they can with bootleg products without getting arrested for violating some kind of copyright or trademark law. It's basically like a fun game to see what kind of bootleg Pringles people can come up with at this point. Prangles, prongles, you name it.

Article 13 has passed. And what might be the potential upsides? The world wants to know. And this comes after countless professionals have said that Article 13 is IMPOSSIBLE to do.