I don't (I think) Message #5 Posted by Steve (Australia) on 25 Nov 2000, 7:58 p.m., in response to message #4 by Dave Hicks
I suppose it comes down to why one would want to fake a label.
I can only see three reasons.
1) the original label contains needed information and has become lost, damaged, unreadable, etc.. and a replacement is needed to retain the important information.
2) the original is lost, damaged, etc., and the owner (for reasons of personal preference) wants to replace it.
3) the original is lost, damaged, etc., and the owner (for commercial gain) wants to replace it.
If you look at these in order, Mr. 1 does not need anything that looks like the original, and I see calculators with liquid paper, adhesive labels, and all other means of sticking formulae to the calculator. There is no problem with this. It's his calculator and he can do what he wants.
Mr. 2 is going one step further. He wants the stickers to look like they were meant to be there. I suppose it's a bit like my filofax with an "intel inside" sticker on it. There is no intent to defraud. However, if he does a good job (and his motives may be restoration) it may well be that further down the line of ownership his work may be mistaken for original manufacture.
Mr. 3 may be doing no more than Mr. 2 (he may be doing less) but it is his motive that we question.
The solution?
Well I really don't think there is one. We can't (at least at the moment) call in Scotland Yard, the FBI, or the Federal Police to investigate calculator fraud, or have international calculator experts verify the goods before each sale. Calculators are not in the same league as renaissance oil paintings.
I suppose it is a personal thing that collectors will have to decide. It's similar to the restore or not restore argument (and that argument is going on in art circles too).
If a calculator is built up from the parts of several dead calculators, the person doing it may not be knowlegable enough to realise that the resulting calculator is not feasable (gold balls in a CV for instance, or a very early serial number CX). And without that knowlege, can we complain if they don't explicitly pass it on?
And what of the difference between a CV with added X functions and Xmemory (internally) produced today with one produced just as the XFunction became available. And how would we know? (I suppose some expert could tell us that a particular type of insulation on wires was not used before X years ago -- but would we be that lucky, and would we pay to find out?)
And what do you do with such a calculator? Smash it to bits?
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