Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

That's the importance of regulatory harmonisation. Eg your laptop charger is probably covered in 20 different indecipherable logos showing compliance with every countries regulators, all of whom have standards at least 99.9% identical. The EU has harmonised regulations internally in order to make completely free trade work, so a single 'CE' logo is enough to show compliance for the entire EU.

Regulatory harmonisation is controversial though, especially here in UK. No matter that its usually boring stuff like agreeing fire retardant coatings on soft furnishings, the newspapers insisted this was a breach of sovereignty. Expect a new British safety standard (identical but with a different logo) to join the pack.



I’m really looking forward to a pile of reduced-safety standards from the people who gave us the Grenfell disaster...


Note that there is the CE symbol (confirmation of Europan standards) and there is also a very simila CE symbol that means "China Export". The second one does not have anything to do with European standards. It is deceptively similar.. guess why


Wikipedia says the European Commission says this is an urban legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking#China_Export I mean I don't know anything about it, just wanted to point that out.

But then this one https://support.ce-check.eu/hc/en-us/articles/360008642600-H... says it's real, I'm confused.

Edit: I'm going to go through every single device/cable I have at home and examine the font and the arrangement of the two letters now, the C and the E need to be on two circles that overlap by exactly the width of the lines.


Do you know if there’s an accurate master list of these labels anywhere? I’m sure the customs and border people must have at least a reference copy floating around.


Isn't it trademark infringement either way? If you tried this with the apple logo and your business was us based you'd be sued out of existence.


I speculate that this logo is mostly used for "cheap crap" where they stamp any random logo you want.

Also if you sell the "cheap crap" to some country outside of EU, you can still slap the nice CE logo there.

And since when shady Chinese companies care about copyrights anyway.


I think part of the puzzle is why they would cheat by stamping a logo that is almost right but not quite. Is it that their level of honesty such that they wouldn't cheat regulations but would cheat a trademark? Maybe they themselves can't tell which logo is the correct one so they just stamp anything?


>I think part of the puzzle is why they would cheat by stamping a logo that is almost right but not quite. Is it that their level of honesty such that they wouldn't cheat regulations but would cheat a trademark?

Maybe it's a lie that they tell themselves so they can sleep better at night. It's not unlike how "sovereign citizens" believe in various flawed legal arguments to justify how they don't have to pay taxes.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: