Jaguar Land Rover forced to concede Jiangling's Evoque look-alike

Automotive News Europe reports that Jaguar Land Rover has been forced to accept a Range Rover Evoque lookalike made by Chinese manufacturer Jiangling. The Financial Times also has the story: it also has a story about US warnings about the effect of weak intellectual property protection in China. It seems like a simple matter of inadequate legal protection: here, and in much of the world, there would be copyright, design and trade mark infringements and either passing off or unfair competition claims. Surely some of those would run in China too? If not, one might ask what on earth a European manufacturer is doing, exposing itself to that sort of risk in the Chinese market - to which the answer is, no doubt, that they can't afford not to be in the Chinese market. In any case, absence from that market would not prevent copying - indeed, it would have left a gap that the copyists might have filled even more readily. And at least JLR have secured a slice of the action: the cachet of having the real thing might sustain them a bit longer, too.