5 ms·

A Chinese company making money via licensing and copyright has got to be the sweetest irony I have ever seen.

ycombinete 8y ago
The ironies and weirdnesses in Chinese economics are so common as to be banal
coldtea 8y ago
So, just like with an American company today? The US was a notorious "copyright breaker" back when it was bootstrapping... E.g.: The U.S. was long a net importer of literary and artistic works, especially from England, which implied that recognition of foreign copyrights would have led to a net deficit in international royalty payments. The Copyright Act recognized this when it specified that “nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books … by any person not a citizen of the United States.” Thus, the statutes explicitly authorized Americans to take free advantage of the cultural output of other countries. As a result, it was alleged that American publishers “indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement.” The tendency to reprint foreign works was encouraged by the existence of tariffs on imported books that ranged as high as 25 percent. The United States stood out in contrast to countries such as France, where Louis Napoleon’s Decree of 1852 prohibited counterfeiting of both foreign and domestic works. Other countries which were affected by American piracy retaliated by refusing to recognize American copyrights. Despite the lobbying of numerous authors and celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic, the American copyright statutes did not allow for copyright protection of foreign works for fully one century. As a result, American publishers and producers freely pirated foreign literature, art, and drama. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-copyright-in-europe-and-the-united-states/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-copyright... So, that's like a parent telling a high schooler not to drink, when they had a fake id and everything in their age...
- knightofmars 8y ago
  >So, that's like a parent telling a high schooler not to drink, when they had a fake id and everything in their age... This argument is so bizarre. If I committed murder in high school should I not be allowed to tell my high schooler not to commit murder? (Yes, that example is a ridiculous extreme but hopefully you get what I'm trying to say.) Simply put, "Two wrongs don't make a right."
  - knightofmars 8y ago
    I'm going to take the downvotes (without an actual response) as a confirmation of the fact that I struck a nerve and did so accurately.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    You can put the details in to the "America did it, so we can too" argument, but it makes it sound a lot more sinister when you do. Essentially, if America did something bad and got away with it, it can be claimed that doing bad things and getting away with them is therefore a good idea, because look how successful America is and doesn't everybody want to be like them?
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Essentially, if America did something bad and got away with it, it can be claimed that doing bad things and getting away with them is therefore a good idea, because look how successful America is and doesn't everybody want to be like them? It's rather the "don't deny the ladder you used to get up to people that came there later" argument. And even more so, don't pretend you're somehow inherently holier than them for not using such a ladder anymore -- now that you're already on the higher level, and fiercely step on the fingers of anybody else trying to climb themselves... The "holiness" and self-restraint in the matter would have to be judged when you're both starting from the same level. As to whether copyright infringement is a bad thing, I'm not sure. It sure is an artificial barrier to the "free market", to which many people in favour of, pay lip service to. Especially ridiculous Disney/Sonny Bono flavoured copyright extensions... If anything, the US good the right thing bad then, and is doing the bad thing now...

The ironies and weirdnesses in Chinese economics are so common as to be banal

So, just like with an American company today? The US was a notorious "copyright breaker" back when it was bootstrapping... E.g.: The U.S. was long a net importer of literary and artistic works, especially from England, which implied that recognition of foreign copyrights would have led to a net deficit in international royalty payments. The Copyright Act recognized this when it specified that “nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books … by any person not a citizen of the United States.” Thus, the statutes explicitly authorized Americans to take free advantage of the cultural output of other countries. As a result, it was alleged that American publishers “indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement.” The tendency to reprint foreign works was encouraged by the existence of tariffs on imported books that ranged as high as 25 percent. The United States stood out in contrast to countries such as France, where Louis Napoleon’s Decree of 1852 prohibited counterfeiting of both foreign and domestic works. Other countries which were affected by American piracy retaliated by refusing to recognize American copyrights. Despite the lobbying of numerous authors and celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic, the American copyright statutes did not allow for copyright protection of foreign works for fully one century. As a result, American publishers and producers freely pirated foreign literature, art, and drama. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-copyright-in-europe-and-the-united-states/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-copyright... So, that's like a parent telling a high schooler not to drink, when they had a fake id and everything in their age...

knightofmars 8y ago
>So, that's like a parent telling a high schooler not to drink, when they had a fake id and everything in their age... This argument is so bizarre. If I committed murder in high school should I not be allowed to tell my high schooler not to commit murder? (Yes, that example is a ridiculous extreme but hopefully you get what I'm trying to say.) Simply put, "Two wrongs don't make a right."
- knightofmars 8y ago
  I'm going to take the downvotes (without an actual response) as a confirmation of the fact that I struck a nerve and did so accurately.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  You can put the details in to the "America did it, so we can too" argument, but it makes it sound a lot more sinister when you do. Essentially, if America did something bad and got away with it, it can be claimed that doing bad things and getting away with them is therefore a good idea, because look how successful America is and doesn't everybody want to be like them?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Essentially, if America did something bad and got away with it, it can be claimed that doing bad things and getting away with them is therefore a good idea, because look how successful America is and doesn't everybody want to be like them? It's rather the "don't deny the ladder you used to get up to people that came there later" argument. And even more so, don't pretend you're somehow inherently holier than them for not using such a ladder anymore -- now that you're already on the higher level, and fiercely step on the fingers of anybody else trying to climb themselves... The "holiness" and self-restraint in the matter would have to be judged when you're both starting from the same level. As to whether copyright infringement is a bad thing, I'm not sure. It sure is an artificial barrier to the "free market", to which many people in favour of, pay lip service to. Especially ridiculous Disney/Sonny Bono flavoured copyright extensions... If anything, the US good the right thing bad then, and is doing the bad thing now...