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Samsung spend 130 million on research on bendable phones. It got stolen by China. How can that be justified? https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-c

Samsung spend 130 million on research on bendable phones. It got stolen by China. How can that be justified? https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-theft/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-t...

chronogram 8y ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/south-korea-charges-11-with-selling-samsung-technology-to-china https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/south-kor... It got stolen by South Korea, how can that be justified?
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  South Korea charged nine people and two companies of illegally selling Samsung Electronics Co.’s bendable screen technology to a Chinese rival. > The sale is the reward, the assignment came earlier. Ps. South Korea was the judge, you are not reading it correctly.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
There's a few ways to justify it I imagine. One is "it saved $130M from being spent again on the same thing". And sure there are arguments against that justification (and for it).
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  It's called R&D, spending too innovate is what it does. Stealing it, is not R&D, it's theft and punishable by law. Eg. Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect and PlayStation Move are the same concepts with a different approach.
  - geofft 8y ago
    Is the world a better place because of that? What if the Kinect and Move had spent their research budget building on top of the Wii instead of reinventing it? Would the world be a better place? (Personally, I find it baffling to see people espousing "research should be private because it yields better outcomes" on a site for an industry so deeply indebted to open source. We have empirical evidence about which approach works better, and it's not the closed private research lab one.)
    - 0815test 8y ago
      Stealing and violating privacy via industrial espionage is not "open source". You're free to make your own research public, or to pay a company for full IP rights on their research and then release the results openly. But what the Chinese are doing is not the same. Even making access to their domestic market conditional on releasing proprietary IP, is in fact a hidden tariff which is not in line with free and fair trade.
      - geofft 8y ago
        Yes, I'm not claiming that violating the laws and norms is a good thing. I'm asking if the laws and norms are defensible and produce a better society. If not, then the argument needs to be "We follow unjust laws for the sake of the broader principle of the rule of law, and we work to change unjust laws so respect for law is maintained," not "These outcomes are bad."
        0815test 8y ago
        The problem is that we're not just talking about a relatively-benign violation of things like copyrights, patents or trade secrets ("IP"): Chinese hacking is a severe violation of privacy; and their practice of forcing IP releases from foreign firms is blatantly unfair given that no reciprocity is involved, and indeed China apparently claims that they're uniquely allowed to engage in such policies because of their status as a "developing country" - itself a rather dubious claim given their reported economic performance. Privacy (and protection of physical property, in general) and fairness in trade are basic principles and far from "unjust".
        geofft 8y ago
        Privacy of companies or of individuals? I don't think privacy of companies is a right, so that argument isn't convincing to me. (Specifically, I believe companies have no particular inherent right to existence the way people do. Companies are creations of law to serve specific goals that benefit people; we should give them whatever privileges are necessary to accomplish that, and not what's not. Privacy of certain things like customer data and things like HR conversations seems pretty clearly helpful, but mostly because that's a proxy for privacy of individuals, not because violating it would violate the company's "privacy.") There's an easy solution to reciprocity: abandon IP protection in the US, too. My entire claim is that that would lead to a better world. If we want to not do that, we should either defend that it would lead to a worse world, or admit that we're not making arguments based on what's best for society. That's why I found the argument about "but IP protection brought us Kinect and Move" unconvincing: it's not clear at all to me that the outcome was better than in the world where the US didn't recognize IP protection.
- PedroBatista 8y ago
  I’m sure you don’t mind if I break into your house and start living there. I mean, you already spent the money there’s no need for me to spend it again on the same thing.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    That's a terribly poor analogy. If you break into my house and start living there, you occupy space and resources I could use myself, IP theft does not deprive the originator of the invention or even first mover advantage profits. It just prevents IP from being used to keep 3rd world nations there. The U.S. did the same to Europe in the 17/18th centuries when IT need to bring itself up to par, so did Japan in the 70s/80s - so did the Europeans to the Chinese before that. China will, (and already does to an extent), innovate and enrich the world, it just needs to catch up fast and this is the best way to do it.
    - PedroBatista 8y ago
      But I wouldn’t kick you out of your house, I would just be there chillin’. Now seriously, you’re trying to justify theft using the old “we’re so little and innocent and they are so powerful and evil”. Just stop.
      - AsyncAwait 8y ago
        IP theft would be like looking at my house and building a very similar one, or perhaps even peeking inside via the windows to note down the exact furniture. I'm not trying to say that it is a flawless way to go about it, or that anybody's 'evil', but please stop pretending that it is not a stage of every country's development at some point. Europe did it, Russia did it, the U.S. did it, Japan did it and now China does it. Perhaps that should tell you something. In the end, this helps a country to move past sweat shops and the like faster and am certainly not going to protest too loud against that.
  - z3phyr 8y ago
    I would not mind if you copy my house internals and my way of life in a cheaper and more efficient manner. I would also not mind if you improve upon those designs(I would encourage you to do so). Find and Reverse Engineer my designs and improve them. I would mind if you break into my house.
rcw4256 8y ago
As a result of this 'theft', consumers now have more bendable phone options.
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  It's all the same tech, what are you defending?? I would hate if this happened to the Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect or Playstation Move. Which triggered HTC Vice and the Oculus adoption, later on: Hololens. ( So AR and VR) They got so much better with actual competition and their own R&D instead of just stealing and hurting the innovator. Us as customers got a lot more options because of competition, not because of theft.
- sgt101 8y ago
  But in the future they will see less innovation as R&D is further slashed.
  - izacus 8y ago
    I see this thrown around all the time when we talk about monopolizing IP and having huge corporations put their lawyer boots on smaller company throats... but is it really true? Will making IP protection weaker actually stifle innovation? Was innovation in industrial era hugely stuffled by not protecting every single patent a huge multi-national conglomerates throw out?
    - sgt101 8y ago
      Well, yes, hence the development of patents. "The English patent system evolved from its early medieval origins into the first modern patent system that recognised intellectual property in order to stimulate invention; this was the crucial legal foundation upon which the Industrial Revolution could emerge and flourish." ([1]Wikipedia) Without patents what you do is create trade secrets, patents publish the concepts that are protected, they are fully disclosed (or the patent is junk) and after 25 years anyone can use them. The 25 years is the time that you have to get payback on your invention - forcing investment in development now before your monopoly expires. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
freeflight 8y ago
The same way any state-sponsored industrial espionage is being justified, even among supposed "friends" [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  Almost all of the world is protected by copyright. You mention 1 example where copyright failed ( 20 years ago...). Nothing is perfect also and it doesn't mean it's wrong to protect innovative companies. But you lack the fundamental understanding that nothing in China has this protection. While our allies do. Ps. Except if you count the clothes of Ivanka Trump of course, that won copyright infringement case in China.... Which was no way a political intervention to appeal to someone with the trade war happening ;) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/business/ivanka-trump-china-trademarks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/business/ivanka-trump-chi... Good rules are better than ego-interventions for the 1% every day of the year.
  - ionised 8y ago
    > But you lack the fundamental understanding that nothing in China has this protection. While our allies do. You asked for a justification and you've answered your own question. It happens because there are no protections for these thins in China. It is not in their culture to assign intellectual property protections in the way US culture does. There's your justification. Their culture is different and they see yours as ridiculous and unenforceable.
    - NicoJuicy 8y ago
      China has no IP-protection because they copy and go. As soon as they would be innovators, they would adopt it. Right now, they have a lot of luck that they are> 1 billion people and stealing everything they can without punishment. IP-protection would happen for Chinese firms, just not outsiders. Don't change my words. "This" protection = global protection. China just has "Chinese" protection. It's not in laid out in rules with them, but it means in 99% of the cases that they are an advantage for Chinese firms. Ps. Blocking the market is an extreme form of IP-protection, it's even just stealing and adjusting the rules ( required Chinese partnerships). They adapted in a very bad way, they also get previous generation tech because firms don't trust it

chronogram 8y ago

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/south-korea-charges-11-with-selling-samsung-technology-to-china https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/south-kor... It got stolen by South Korea, how can that be justified?

NicoJuicy 8y ago
South Korea charged nine people and two companies of illegally selling Samsung Electronics Co.’s bendable screen technology to a Chinese rival. > The sale is the reward, the assignment came earlier. Ps. South Korea was the judge, you are not reading it correctly.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

There's a few ways to justify it I imagine. One is "it saved $130M from being spent again on the same thing". And sure there are arguments against that justification (and for it).

NicoJuicy 8y ago
It's called R&D, spending too innovate is what it does. Stealing it, is not R&D, it's theft and punishable by law. Eg. Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect and PlayStation Move are the same concepts with a different approach.
- geofft 8y ago
  Is the world a better place because of that? What if the Kinect and Move had spent their research budget building on top of the Wii instead of reinventing it? Would the world be a better place? (Personally, I find it baffling to see people espousing "research should be private because it yields better outcomes" on a site for an industry so deeply indebted to open source. We have empirical evidence about which approach works better, and it's not the closed private research lab one.)
  - 0815test 8y ago
    Stealing and violating privacy via industrial espionage is not "open source". You're free to make your own research public, or to pay a company for full IP rights on their research and then release the results openly. But what the Chinese are doing is not the same. Even making access to their domestic market conditional on releasing proprietary IP, is in fact a hidden tariff which is not in line with free and fair trade.
    - geofft 8y ago
      Yes, I'm not claiming that violating the laws and norms is a good thing. I'm asking if the laws and norms are defensible and produce a better society. If not, then the argument needs to be "We follow unjust laws for the sake of the broader principle of the rule of law, and we work to change unjust laws so respect for law is maintained," not "These outcomes are bad."
      - 0815test 8y ago
        The problem is that we're not just talking about a relatively-benign violation of things like copyrights, patents or trade secrets ("IP"): Chinese hacking is a severe violation of privacy; and their practice of forcing IP releases from foreign firms is blatantly unfair given that no reciprocity is involved, and indeed China apparently claims that they're uniquely allowed to engage in such policies because of their status as a "developing country" - itself a rather dubious claim given their reported economic performance. Privacy (and protection of physical property, in general) and fairness in trade are basic principles and far from "unjust".
        geofft 8y ago
        Privacy of companies or of individuals? I don't think privacy of companies is a right, so that argument isn't convincing to me. (Specifically, I believe companies have no particular inherent right to existence the way people do. Companies are creations of law to serve specific goals that benefit people; we should give them whatever privileges are necessary to accomplish that, and not what's not. Privacy of certain things like customer data and things like HR conversations seems pretty clearly helpful, but mostly because that's a proxy for privacy of individuals, not because violating it would violate the company's "privacy.") There's an easy solution to reciprocity: abandon IP protection in the US, too. My entire claim is that that would lead to a better world. If we want to not do that, we should either defend that it would lead to a worse world, or admit that we're not making arguments based on what's best for society. That's why I found the argument about "but IP protection brought us Kinect and Move" unconvincing: it's not clear at all to me that the outcome was better than in the world where the US didn't recognize IP protection.
PedroBatista 8y ago
I’m sure you don’t mind if I break into your house and start living there. I mean, you already spent the money there’s no need for me to spend it again on the same thing.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  That's a terribly poor analogy. If you break into my house and start living there, you occupy space and resources I could use myself, IP theft does not deprive the originator of the invention or even first mover advantage profits. It just prevents IP from being used to keep 3rd world nations there. The U.S. did the same to Europe in the 17/18th centuries when IT need to bring itself up to par, so did Japan in the 70s/80s - so did the Europeans to the Chinese before that. China will, (and already does to an extent), innovate and enrich the world, it just needs to catch up fast and this is the best way to do it.
  - PedroBatista 8y ago
    But I wouldn’t kick you out of your house, I would just be there chillin’. Now seriously, you’re trying to justify theft using the old “we’re so little and innocent and they are so powerful and evil”. Just stop.
    - AsyncAwait 8y ago
      IP theft would be like looking at my house and building a very similar one, or perhaps even peeking inside via the windows to note down the exact furniture. I'm not trying to say that it is a flawless way to go about it, or that anybody's 'evil', but please stop pretending that it is not a stage of every country's development at some point. Europe did it, Russia did it, the U.S. did it, Japan did it and now China does it. Perhaps that should tell you something. In the end, this helps a country to move past sweat shops and the like faster and am certainly not going to protest too loud against that.
- z3phyr 8y ago
  I would not mind if you copy my house internals and my way of life in a cheaper and more efficient manner. I would also not mind if you improve upon those designs(I would encourage you to do so). Find and Reverse Engineer my designs and improve them. I would mind if you break into my house.

rcw4256 8y ago

As a result of this 'theft', consumers now have more bendable phone options.

NicoJuicy 8y ago
It's all the same tech, what are you defending?? I would hate if this happened to the Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect or Playstation Move. Which triggered HTC Vice and the Oculus adoption, later on: Hololens. ( So AR and VR) They got so much better with actual competition and their own R&D instead of just stealing and hurting the innovator. Us as customers got a lot more options because of competition, not because of theft.
sgt101 8y ago
But in the future they will see less innovation as R&D is further slashed.
- izacus 8y ago
  I see this thrown around all the time when we talk about monopolizing IP and having huge corporations put their lawyer boots on smaller company throats... but is it really true? Will making IP protection weaker actually stifle innovation? Was innovation in industrial era hugely stuffled by not protecting every single patent a huge multi-national conglomerates throw out?
  - sgt101 8y ago
    Well, yes, hence the development of patents. "The English patent system evolved from its early medieval origins into the first modern patent system that recognised intellectual property in order to stimulate invention; this was the crucial legal foundation upon which the Industrial Revolution could emerge and flourish." ([1]Wikipedia) Without patents what you do is create trade secrets, patents publish the concepts that are protected, they are fully disclosed (or the patent is junk) and after 25 years anyone can use them. The 25 years is the time that you have to get payback on your invention - forcing investment in development now before your monopoly expires. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent

freeflight 8y ago

The same way any state-sponsored industrial espionage is being justified, even among supposed "friends" [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...

NicoJuicy 8y ago
Almost all of the world is protected by copyright. You mention 1 example where copyright failed ( 20 years ago...). Nothing is perfect also and it doesn't mean it's wrong to protect innovative companies. But you lack the fundamental understanding that nothing in China has this protection. While our allies do. Ps. Except if you count the clothes of Ivanka Trump of course, that won copyright infringement case in China.... Which was no way a political intervention to appeal to someone with the trade war happening ;) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/business/ivanka-trump-china-trademarks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/business/ivanka-trump-chi... Good rules are better than ego-interventions for the 1% every day of the year.
- ionised 8y ago
  > But you lack the fundamental understanding that nothing in China has this protection. While our allies do. You asked for a justification and you've answered your own question. It happens because there are no protections for these thins in China. It is not in their culture to assign intellectual property protections in the way US culture does. There's your justification. Their culture is different and they see yours as ridiculous and unenforceable.
  - NicoJuicy 8y ago
    China has no IP-protection because they copy and go. As soon as they would be innovators, they would adopt it. Right now, they have a lot of luck that they are> 1 billion people and stealing everything they can without punishment. IP-protection would happen for Chinese firms, just not outsiders. Don't change my words. "This" protection = global protection. China just has "Chinese" protection. It's not in laid out in rules with them, but it means in 99% of the cases that they are an advantage for Chinese firms. Ps. Blocking the market is an extreme form of IP-protection, it's even just stealing and adjusting the rules ( required Chinese partnerships). They adapted in a very bad way, they also get previous generation tech because firms don't trust it