A small town in southern Hesse is the birthplace of very clever cutlery.
Erbach is the name of the city, has almost 14,000 inhabitants and is the headquarters of Koziol, a company specializing in design items and home accessories.
“Klikk” is the name of one of their bestsellers: a cutlery set that consists of a knife, fork and spoon and is sold in bright colors.
And this easy-to-use, easy-to-carry cutlery set has many imitators around the world.
Vulgo: counterfeiter.
One of these counterfeiters, an Australian media group that had the cutlery produced in China in poor quality, has now received first prize in the "Plagiarius campaign" for stealing the idea.
Every year – now for the 46th time – Plagiarius, a registered association, awards negative prizes to particularly brazen product and brand pirates who make use of German companies.
Eight products were awarded (if you want to call it that) last Monday, including two Klikk cutlery sets from Koziol, machine and car parts, tools, men's shirts - and a bowl for cats, which is no longer called a bowl but a food bar .
The prices say nothing about whether what happened there was legal.
"The aim of the Plagiarius campaign is rather to raise public awareness of the questionable - and sometimes criminal - business methods of product and brand pirates, and to sensitize industry, politics and consumers to the extent, damage and risks of the problem," says the website of the club.
Fighting counterfeiters is difficult
Often - as in the case of the cutlery set from southern Hesse - a design is adopted by product counterfeiters and passed off as their own, into which the manufacturer has invested a lot of time and money.
"The cutlery is so practical that the counterfeiters probably liked it," says Katrin Bode, press spokeswoman for Koziol.
"The cutlery set is a complex product in terms of development, but the individual parts can easily be reworked." Taking action against counterfeiters is difficult - and above all expensive.
At Koziol, basic property rights are registered for all products, so-called design patents.
However, enforcing them, and then against companies based abroad, such as in China or Bangladesh, is complicated.
In some cases, the counterfeiters are even more cheeky: They copy the product one-to-one, including the manufacturer's logo, such as this year's second and third prize in the "Plagiarius Campaign".
This is a pressure gauge from the Lower Franconian company Wika, or an angular contact ball bearing from the Schaeffler Group.
The German company name is on the fakes, but the quality of the product is – as CT examinations and 3D scans by Plagiarius show – significantly worse.
With machine parts that are used in the chemical industry, for example, this can quickly become dangerous - for people and the machine.
However, every forgery causes financial damage for the manufacturers of the originals.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that manufacturers around the world lose more than 400 billion euros every year.
A country like Germany with many manufacturing companies and an export-oriented economy is likely to be disproportionately affected.
When it comes to spotting fakes, an old adage has to be revisited: the devil is in the details.
Or rather: inside the products.
The real "Klikk" cutlery set is made of durable plastic, while the counterfeit is made of easily deformable and heat-sensitive plastic.
However, the differences are difficult to see with the naked eye.
And it is precisely this effect that an upcoming exhibition in the Plagiarius Museum in Sigmaringen is focusing on.
From April 29, 350 objects from the history of the Plagiarius Prize will be on display there – forgeries and originals side by side.
The presentation of the Plagiarius prizes goes back to the idea of a German designer, Rido Busse, who discovered a scale at a trade fair abroad that looked exactly like one of his company's scales, but was a copy.
In 1977, Busse announced the prize for the first time.
Buses died last year.