Personally, I don't see the 'eating into profit' argument as being necessary, because in my view, collectors make up a fraction of a percentage of HasTakTom's sales - the only way that third party companies could possibly affect HasTakTom's profit is if parents and children start buying more 3rd party products than official ones and I personally would debate whether parents and kids are even aware of the existence of third party products.

That being said, there is absolutely no reason for any third party company to blatantly infringe on another's IP, Fansproject are definitely in the grey zone but IMO this figure is well within the red no matter how good it is because this is blatantly Soundwave.

Fansproject have been lucky because they either produce non-complete figures (upgrade kits) or complete figures with enough differences that they don't necessarily actually resemble HasTakTom's IPs, repaint FP stuff (say Defender or Munitioner etc.) and I put it to you that if they didn't aim them at TF collectors and Fans then you'd never pick their homages.

I-Gear have clearly shown a complete disregard for copyright when it comes to distributing infringing products, I just hope that Perfect Effect, who show quite a bit of promise IMO, aren't falling in with the wrong crowd.