[naive]

I love knockoffs, but they can actually be kind of risky (legally). My girlfriend was given some dre beats headphones knocked off in china, they were like 10% the price of legit ones and the same quality.

what kind of risk do you mean?

If you buy knockoffs online, customs may inspect your packaging. If they discover your shipment is counterfeit items, best case scenario you will lose the shipment and anything you paid for it. Worst case scenario is they will come right to your house and arrest you, put you in jail for counterfeiting (yes, actually jail in some instances), and THEN you can get sued by the intellectual property holders. I know of few people from another forum that were just running drop shipping websites, where a customer places an order with them, and another company ships the goods right to the customer. Several got straight fucked by the feds and are facing years in jail for just being a salesperson, not even possessing, shipping the goods.

Presuming Johnny Law doesnt get to you, the counterfeit electronics can still introduce more risk themselves. There have been virii embedded into some of these fake ipods, thumbdrives, software, etc. There are lots of chinese hackers that target manufacturers to embed virii in their products, and these counterfeiters are much softer targets than typical organizations. This doesnt apply specifically to knockoffs even, but imagine if that cheap mouse you bought online is actually a hardware keylogger/backdoor. It would be tough to detect, and any amount of reinstalling / etc would be fruitless if you kept using the same mouse.