Listening to last week's reports on changing attitudes to fake goods, it struck me that the opposite is true of luxury brands. When the value of a Louis Vuitton handbag lay solely in the quality of its leather and the precision of the stitching, forging one would have been an offputtingly expensive affair. But as the value shifted from the intrinsic nature of the handbag to the empty social cachet delivered by the monogram stamped onto it, the crime got easier and easier.

Apparently, we should all be worried about the fact two thirds of us don't appear to think this is a crime at all . . . or at least that it's one we're prepared to collude in. Despite the dire warnings about funding international terrorism and criminal empires, I don't find it surprising that consumers feel ambivalent about the moral status of this trade. There are kinds of fakery that matter hugely and would justify considerable efforts and expense to suppress. Forged proprietary drugs, for example, have resulted in deaths and horrible suffering. But faking a bit of Burberry bling isn't remotely comparable. Nothing is endangered but the naive customer's self-esteem and the original company's profit margins . . . and since both of those are faintly contemptible anyway, it's difficult to get too worked up about the fact.

The odd legal department might take umbrage at that last sentence but what else should we feel about companies that trade so extensively on an artificial exclusivity, guaranteed by price tag alone? Indeed, you might characterise the luxury-brands market as a form of legalised fraud . . . an enterprise in which customers are charged absurd and arbitrary prices for an essentially valueless object: the logo. And since customers understand they are being fleeced, they feel less compunction about fleecing back, by going to a more economical supplier of trashy street kudos.

Forgery thrives best when the gap between intrinsic value and price tag opens up enough to make faking worthwhile . . . and by trading in snobbery and ostentation, the luxury-brand companies have prised it apart wide enough to drive a pantechnicon through.

They richly deserve their dodgy imitators.