Ernst, as you know quite a bit about the paper business and you live in the EU where most of these papers are manufactured in one or the other of the several plants that exist which can do that, perhaps you could explain on what legal basis either a paper manufacturing facility (perhaps facilities because more than one may be involved with the same paper) or the brand-name company marketing the paper can simply re-brand the same thing and not run afoul of European and international copyright conventions, which are pretty strict or be sued by the offended party; the only exception I could think of would be if they were in cahoots with each other, in which case they could be contravening European competition law, which is by all accounts stricter than ours in North America. I think the more likely story is that there are subtle differences between these papers mandated by the ink and paper technologists the printer manufacturers and the better name-brand paper companies employ in order to determine the formulae they want reflected in their brand, in cooperation with the paper manufacturers. Some of these differences may be quite technical and perhaps not necessarily captured in your Spectrum Viz readings or in some other spectrophotometric readings of these papers.
It always surprises me that EU laws are seen as more strict + consumer friendly than what the US has to offer in laws. The US class actions have a tradition where the EU just recently opened up that legal road for consumers. Lobbyists in Bruxelles (among them representatives of US companies) are probably as active as lobbyists are in Washington so our laws are compromised on consumer interests as well. The whole globe has felt the banking crises, my gut feeling is that the ones responsible for that crises were punished more in the US than in the EU. The Ahold stock affair delivered compensation for US and EU share holders in a US court, not in a EU court so far. More to the point; the Epson orange plague dye ink affair delivered compensation to US ink users, nothing happened in the EU, our class action system simply did not exist then.
I do not think that putting another label on a product is in conflict with any law in the EU if the label describes the product properly. Few standards other than EU metric units are required on inkjet papers. Contravening European competition law is certainly something where EU government has shown its quality, partly thanks to a tough Dutch lady. Hard to say whether that is happening with the papers we use. Some years ago I computed the costs of inkjet ink per ml for different cartridge sizes, all sold by the three big inkjet printer companies. There was a remarkable price correlation between the cartridge sizes. If Neeltje Smit Kroes had been my neighbour I would have told her to take action.
SpectrumViz does not reveal all the properties of inkjet papers so sure there could be differences in printing. Of the IGFS clones I am still in doubt whether there are one or two manufacturers. It could even be a baryta/fibre paper standard more manufacturers aim at, a situation quite common in papers for the offset printing industry.
Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst
http://www.pigment-print.com/spectralplots/spectrumviz_1.htmJanuary 2016 update, 700+ inkjet media white spectral plots
