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There is one critical difference between America and China here. American companies have for the most part not been engaging in wholesale state sponsored theft

by zaphar 7y ago

There is one critical difference between America and China here. American companies have for the most part not been engaging in wholesale state sponsored theft of Chinese IP. Whatever you may think of the wisdom of a trade war, no one can really argue that China hasn't given the US all the ammunition it needed to give political cover to engaged in one.

molteanu 7y ago
When you're advanced enough, there is no need for you do to IP. Maybe the risk is not worth it or there is nothing to gain from it. It's the same argument with the open markets. When you're already a developed economy, open markets benefit you since you have the best products, your production facilities are in place and you can offer both quantity, quality and reasonable prices. But when you are a developing nation, protections are needed for key sectors. US did both of these things. That is, closed markets and protectionism and IP theft. It doesn't matter that, oh, "this was a long time ago, it doesn't count". It does. Advantages add up year after year, century after century. I'm not even trying to defend China, but instead, trying to be clear and honest about how these things work in the real world, regardless of sentiments and your favorite team. I just did a quick lookup, you can do the same. I'm sure there are more examples out there. In 1787, American agent Andrew Mitchell was intercepted by British authorities as he was trying to smuggle new technology out of the UK. His trunk was seized after being loaded on board a ship. Inside the trunk were models and drawings of one Britain's great industrial machines. Mitchell himself was able to escape and sought refuge in Denmark. But his mission marks the start of a sustained US campaign to steal technology from the world's hi-tech superpower of the day. [1] [1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-nations-are-stealing-us-technology-america-has-history https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-na...
- Gorbzel 7y ago
  > I'm not even trying to defend China... That is 100% exactly what you’re doing. Indistinguishable from PRC sponsored misinformation.
  - molteanu 7y ago
    Huh? No, I'm trying not to be a hypocrite.
  - throwaway-hn123 7y ago
    Oh do shut up, you trivial little moron.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    Which part is misinformation?
- leereeves 7y ago
  And once China starts making discoveries of their own, they'll guard anything they discover. It's naive to imagine that they'll share their IP.
  - xbmcuser 7y ago
    They have already started making discoveries and advances and probably will get into IP enforcement like the US in the next decade or so.
  - Zenst 7y ago
    As they did with gunpowder, china-clay, silkworms, tea and even Panda's. I think only Panda's out of that small list have their IP still protected and the rest got industrial-theft treatment over the centuries. Though in fairness - they do share Panda's.
    - Quarrelsome 7y ago
      Byzantines robbed the silkworms in possibly one of the oldest written records of corporate espionage?
      - Zenst 7y ago
        I believe so, even if wiki disagree's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins
    - whitenation1488 7y ago
      Gunpowder was just an accident, some guy mixed charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur. clay, silkworms, tea all come from nature the Chinese are not and have never been a innovative people, they had a large population so they got lucky and discovered a bunch of simple inventions first. The Chinese despite outnumbering whites historically 10 to 1 have never produced a genius equivalent to Tesla, Einstein, Newton, Gauss, Feynman, Von Neumann etc...
    - theandrewbailey 7y ago
- pjc50 7y ago
  Information Feudalism (Drahos & Braithwaite) has lots more on this subject. After both world wars there was a lot of .. forced technology transfer from Germany.
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    Not only technology per se, but without critical Nazi Germany people like Von Braun, US wouldn't send anybody to the moon in 60s. Or all the knowledge happily taken and used from Mendelesque cruel inhuman 'research' done in concentration camps. AFAIK no researcher was morally above and simply refused to work with those data.
    - eropple 7y ago
      > Or all the knowledge happily taken and used from Mendelesque cruel inhuman 'research' done in concentration camps. AFAIK no researcher was morally above and simply refused to work with those data. So I've had cause to research this one in the past. "All the knowledge"--most of the Nazi concentration camp research was absolute garbage. Turns out junk-science sadists create junk-science results and it is generally accepted that the overwhelming bulk Nazi concentration camp research was useless or near-useless as actual scientific research. I am unaware of any value being derived from the Josef Mengele work that you seem to be referring to--Gregor MenDel died sixty years before World War II, but please correct me if you're referring to someone else. Some research from the Nazi concentration camp experiments is occasionally referred to, low-pressure/high-altitude research out of Dachau being arguably, as I understand it, the most valuable. (The other common cite, Rascher's freezing tests, were on nonrepresentative subjects and indicate that the moderate freezing that is safely and ethically studied is amplified, but does not step change, when freezing becomes extreme.) Where this data is used, it does not generally form the main body of research and mostly confirms what is known from other sources. "Happily"--in the (rare) cases where Nazi findings are used, it's used with reluctance. There are evolving and hardening ethical codes around the use of this data as well, particularly from the 1980s onward; today, the use of any of this data must be explicitly detailed and the method of its collection is universally condemned. Most troublingly for the pursuit of truth and some kind of decency, this argument typically is used as an ahistorical tu quoque, as is being done in this case. It's not a particularly good argument, though--even were it more than if-you-squint-and-pick-and-choose true.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  Also found some history here: https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/9yfn35/ip_theft_is_a_common_issue_in_a_historical/ https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/9yfn35/ip_thef... Edit: Question: In the post they talk about the Japanese taking photos of products. I'm not sure if I'm understanding what happened correctly, but if I am, shouldn't we make a distinction between just clever inference/reverse engineering (which is legal and done all the time) and outright IP theft/industrial espionage? I see IP theft/industrial espionage as being about stealing information not legally available to you, but reverse engineering and imitating a product are about trying to figure out how something works that you legally already have access to, and inferring things based on that. I feel like if a country has done the former, we shouldn't compare it to one that does the latter (currently apparently China)?
- sschueller 7y ago
  Also let's not forget about Operation Paperclip. You can toss the moral high ground out of the door. "Operation Paperclip was a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) largely carried out by Special Agents of Army CIC, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to America for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959. Many were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
  - pjc50 7y ago
    The only unethical part of that was exempting them from war crimes trials; although I think that was only really relevant to those directly ordering the use of forced labour in the V2 programme. The rest were treated as some combination of prisoner of war, asylum seeker, and defector. They didn't exactly want to remain in Germany to be captured by the Soviets.
    - walshemj 7y ago
      And von Brun was arrested for complaining about the treatment of the labourers I belive.
- aey 7y ago
  Yes, and Britain had full sovereignty to defend itself. If the British chose not to, it’s because they valued trade with the US over the cost of IP. The US may choose the opposite with China.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Well, that was immediately after the UK had lost the war of independence, so their options may have been rather limited.
    - AlbertoGP 7y ago
      Yes, one example was the power loom which was out of their control once it arrived in the USA: “The Spies Who Launched America’s Industrial Revolution” https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur... “Among those sniffing out innovations across the Atlantic was Harvard graduate and Boston merchant, Francis Cabot Lowell. As the War of 1812 raged on, Lowell set sail from Great Britain in possession of the enemy’s most precious commercial secret. He carried with him pirated plans for Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, which had made Great Britain the world’s leading industrial power. Halfway across the Atlantic, a British frigate intercepted Lowell’s ship. Although the British double-searched his luggage and detained him for days, Lowell knew they would never find any evidence of espionage for he had hidden the plans in the one place they would never find them—inside his photographic mind. Unable to find any sign of spy craft, the British allowed Lowell to return to Boston, where he used Cartwright’s design to help propel the Industrial Revolution in the United States.”
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  By this logic, one could justify chattel slavery in a modern country with an agrarian economy because that was US practice in 1787.
  - AsyncAwait 7y ago
    Yes, because saying that every rapidly developing country does IP theft as a way to speed up development, including the U.S., is exactly comparable. But if you do want to run with something as ridiculous, the U.S. holds the largest prison population on the planet and effectively forces them to do labor at a criminal hourly rate, you could say that's not as far from slavery as many would like to think.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      Don't overlook that all those criminals didn't become criminals involuntarily, like the slaves did.
      - AsyncAwait 7y ago
        Sure, am not suggesting it's exactly the same, not even close. But the treatment they get in prison, the fact that minorities are locked up at an alarming rate for drug possession, (not even distribution), the fact that they're used effectively as a slave labor force in many places, (laughable daily pay). Just because somebody's a criminal does not mean they're no longer human and arguably many of these locked up are there for crimes that we're starting to realize perhaps shouldn't be criminalized in the first place.
- 86carr 7y ago
  That is a terrible article to base an argument on. You come off more as anti-american than open minded.
- MR4D 7y ago
  You're confusing two very different things: 1 - Stealing technology from one country and using it within your own country to increase your competitiveness. 2 - Stealing technology from one country and using it to build a competitive advantage for your firms in that first country (or any other country not your own). The first, depending one which treaties your country is a part of, may not even be considered stealing. The second clearly is.
yogthos 7y ago
Nobody is going to care about this in the long run, and it's pretty clear that China has already moved past US capabilities with tech like 5G. This will only spur more investment in domestic technology. China has a far better education system, a lot more people, and a government that's able to do long term planning. I expect them to leapfrog US within a decade or so.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  I tend to agree with you. I think you are saying that long term it is not a good idea to force economic adversaries to produce their own home grown tech. I have what is probably a bad analogy: it is like we are physically stronger now but we force economic adversaries to go work out at the gym and get in shape.
- patentatt 7y ago
  That overlooks the long history and cultural norm of borrowing or copying to advance. Chinese culture does not place the same value on pioneering as the US. If China does become a tech leader it will have to shift those deeply rooted cultural forces first. That, and their government that is capable of long term planning is also incapable of tolerating diversity, dissent, and free thought. I do not think China will become the technology leader you’re hypothesizing. Edit: Why don’t you ask the millions in the re-education camps how advanced China’s education system is?
  - yogthos 7y ago
    Are we talking about the same China here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY
  - NotPaidToPost 7y ago
    > Chinese culture does not place the same value on pioneering as the US. That's clearly not true and is visible everywhere in China. > is also incapable of tolerating diversity, dissent, and free thought. That's not true. Chinese culture tolerates diversity and uniqueness much more than Japanese culture, for example. Discussions would gain in value if people commented on what they have at least a modicum of knowledge about and were open to learn others' cultures.
simion314 7y ago
I am wondering if the huge IP theft is mostly propaganda similar to the one US uses before it starts a war or changes some government in other country.
- craigsmansion 7y ago
  It depends. The most well-known and common form of "IP theft" is cheaply made Chinese knock-offs that are forgeries. That's trademark infringement. It's not that big of a problem. What is an actual problematic form of "IP theft" is China appropriating trade-secrets. The bulk of "IP theft" that is used to fuel the current war of words seems to be patent infringement. Patent infringement sounds problematic, but really isn't. Even though China can produce devices that infringe, they can't sell those goods back to areas of the world where patent enforcement isn't as lax. They can sell them in China and that's a large market, but: - companies buying cheaply produced local copies weren't likely to buy the real thing in the first place. - Local copies are of inferior quality. By the time the local copies approach the quality of the original, they will be priced in the same ballpark as the original (and the original will be on the next generation). So yes, there is "IP theft" going on, but once again the term "IP" is being thrown around to obfuscate matters to support a political end and reality is quite a bit more complex but not as threatening as it's made out to be.
  - patentatt 7y ago
    That ignores the advancing production capabilities and the vast grey market that moves goods into the US. That and the complacency of Amazon produce a situation where high quality knock offs can be made in China and find their way into the US market quite easily. Note: I’m speaking not of trademark infringement but patent infringement. It’s really no different. Patent infringement is problematic.
    - simion314 7y ago
      And instead of blocking the import of those fake products or the ones that infringe some IP (hopefully after you prove that) the US is blocking Huawei because of security concerns and instead of trying to find if there are backdoors in Huawei products, discussing how can we detect this backdoors, compare this backdoors with the ones in US products we are trying to switch the narative to the cheap Chinese products that are imported by US companies into US.
Zenst 7y ago
Maybe, but then historically - did China start stealing western IP or did the west? Silkworms, tea, pottery, gunpowder.... many things that got invented in China and in effect stolen by the west. So you could argue that the west gave China ammunition in the past to go down this route. Either way - the whole aspect of one country stealing another's secrets in regard to trade and product has a very long history. What the consumers (the ones affected) really need to be seeing though is a smoking gun. Whilst we are not talking WMD's here, we are talking about the same level of proof being bestowed upon the joe-public. That - does need to change and equally such evidence need to be credible with more than a grain of truth about it. Sure we have all read and heard and kinda-know what's going on and has gone on, but the public need to be told in a way that is clear cut and removes all doubt.
- sanxiyn 7y ago
  The west's stealing of silkworm (ca. 552) is a very interesting story. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_int...
  - Zenst 7y ago
    Yes and many a well-done documentary telling the story. Though the story of how tea was smuggled out is one I've only recently become aware of and equally as fascinating. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea-heist-9866709/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea...
- hahahaha23 7y ago
  China smuggled sweet potato http://www.chinastudyabroad.org/indepthchina/1039-china-and-the-sweet-potato http://www.chinastudyabroad.org/indepthchina/1039-china-and-...
nicoburns 7y ago
Looking at it the other way: America has state sponsored restriction of free use of knowledge. IP law is considered important by America (and it has imposed this everywhere), but it is not straightforwardly a good thing (and I think most people would argue that copyright protection periods are currently too long)
sterlind 7y ago
Until now. The US seems to think Huawei poses a national security threat. Huawei seems to have won on 5G, to the point where UK is considering buying Huawei 5G equipment despite tons of pressure. Therefore, stealing the IP would be a national security priority. I'd bet dollars to donuts the NSA is trying to steal Huawei's 5G IP right now, though it'll be hard since they can't easily tap within China (no fiber links in friendly waters) and CIA's humint presence got rolled up when China hacked their network.
- crazypyro 7y ago
  I think it wouldn't be so unreasonable to assume someone in the US government IC has Huawei's IP already.
- bugdd0 7y ago
  They don't need to steal. They can just do the same they did to ZTE, they managed to install a person or two into their board of directors as part of the settlement of the dispute.
peteretep 7y ago
In before "America stole from the British so it's OK" comments! Ah, no, look, I'm three hours late. _А у вас негров линчуют_
- throw667843 7y ago
  It’s not OK, but it shows this is natural. Like Japan stealing IP in the 80s and South Korea in the 90s.
gloflo 7y ago
Oh look! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial... And no one can argue that the west including the US has given the rest of the world enough ammunition to feel a bit mistreated in the last centuries of exploitation.
AsyncAwait 7y ago
> American companies have for the most part not been engaging in wholesale state sponsored theft of Chinese IP. But they were in theft of European IP when the U.S. was at a similar developmental level than China is now.
mtw 7y ago
There is no wholesale theft. Theft is getting something against their will or them not knowing. China offered foreign corporations to open factories in China, under the condition that's it's done with a local partner. Western companies put IP, funds and many other assets in the joint venture, willingly. This is the same as American corporations selling tanks and planes to Israel. Now look right now and you have Israeli companies producing latest-gen weapons, with a large portion integrating American design and IP. Where is the outrage? If you are thinking about groups of hackers hacking into networks and stealing plans and designs, we're more at the stage of McCarthyism hysteria or anti-japanese sentiments in the 80-90s. So far, what's more obvious is state-sponsored Russian hackers, and a bit behind Israeli hackers. Now at the individual level or at corporation level, it is true there are cases of theft. For example, there are blatant copies of the Mercedes G-Wagon, many other cars and products. Chinese will get a copy of your product and will find a way to sell you a copy for 1/3rd the price. There is no wholesale state sponsored theft, and a large percentage of Chinese companies actually follow the law. I think people must be very careful currently. You're just being a mouthpiece for Steve Bannon and Trump by writing "wholesale state sponsored theft"
jacquesm 7y ago
> American companies have for the most part not been engaging in wholesale state sponsored theft of Chinese IP. That's because the Chinese don't have IP worth stealing. But there have been quite a few documented cases of the US stealing IP from European countries that they thought was worth stealing...

by zaphar 7y ago

molteanu 7y ago

When you're advanced enough, there is no need for you do to IP. Maybe the risk is not worth it or there is nothing to gain from it. It's the same argument with the open markets. When you're already a developed economy, open markets benefit you since you have the best products, your production facilities are in place and you can offer both quantity, quality and reasonable prices. But when you are a developing nation, protections are needed for key sectors. US did both of these things. That is, closed markets and protectionism and IP theft. It doesn't matter that, oh, "this was a long time ago, it doesn't count". It does. Advantages add up year after year, century after century. I'm not even trying to defend China, but instead, trying to be clear and honest about how these things work in the real world, regardless of sentiments and your favorite team. I just did a quick lookup, you can do the same. I'm sure there are more examples out there. In 1787, American agent Andrew Mitchell was intercepted by British authorities as he was trying to smuggle new technology out of the UK. His trunk was seized after being loaded on board a ship. Inside the trunk were models and drawings of one Britain's great industrial machines. Mitchell himself was able to escape and sought refuge in Denmark. But his mission marks the start of a sustained US campaign to steal technology from the world's hi-tech superpower of the day. [1] [1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-nations-are-stealing-us-technology-america-has-history https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-na...

Gorbzel 7y ago
> I'm not even trying to defend China... That is 100% exactly what you’re doing. Indistinguishable from PRC sponsored misinformation.
- molteanu 7y ago
  Huh? No, I'm trying not to be a hypocrite.
- throwaway-hn123 7y ago
  Oh do shut up, you trivial little moron.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  Which part is misinformation?
leereeves 7y ago
And once China starts making discoveries of their own, they'll guard anything they discover. It's naive to imagine that they'll share their IP.
- xbmcuser 7y ago
  They have already started making discoveries and advances and probably will get into IP enforcement like the US in the next decade or so.
- Zenst 7y ago
  As they did with gunpowder, china-clay, silkworms, tea and even Panda's. I think only Panda's out of that small list have their IP still protected and the rest got industrial-theft treatment over the centuries. Though in fairness - they do share Panda's.
  - Quarrelsome 7y ago
    Byzantines robbed the silkworms in possibly one of the oldest written records of corporate espionage?
    - Zenst 7y ago
      I believe so, even if wiki disagree's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins
  - whitenation1488 7y ago
    Gunpowder was just an accident, some guy mixed charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur. clay, silkworms, tea all come from nature the Chinese are not and have never been a innovative people, they had a large population so they got lucky and discovered a bunch of simple inventions first. The Chinese despite outnumbering whites historically 10 to 1 have never produced a genius equivalent to Tesla, Einstein, Newton, Gauss, Feynman, Von Neumann etc...
  - theandrewbailey 7y ago
pjc50 7y ago
Information Feudalism (Drahos & Braithwaite) has lots more on this subject. After both world wars there was a lot of .. forced technology transfer from Germany.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  Not only technology per se, but without critical Nazi Germany people like Von Braun, US wouldn't send anybody to the moon in 60s. Or all the knowledge happily taken and used from Mendelesque cruel inhuman 'research' done in concentration camps. AFAIK no researcher was morally above and simply refused to work with those data.
  - eropple 7y ago
    > Or all the knowledge happily taken and used from Mendelesque cruel inhuman 'research' done in concentration camps. AFAIK no researcher was morally above and simply refused to work with those data. So I've had cause to research this one in the past. "All the knowledge"--most of the Nazi concentration camp research was absolute garbage. Turns out junk-science sadists create junk-science results and it is generally accepted that the overwhelming bulk Nazi concentration camp research was useless or near-useless as actual scientific research. I am unaware of any value being derived from the Josef Mengele work that you seem to be referring to--Gregor MenDel died sixty years before World War II, but please correct me if you're referring to someone else. Some research from the Nazi concentration camp experiments is occasionally referred to, low-pressure/high-altitude research out of Dachau being arguably, as I understand it, the most valuable. (The other common cite, Rascher's freezing tests, were on nonrepresentative subjects and indicate that the moderate freezing that is safely and ethically studied is amplified, but does not step change, when freezing becomes extreme.) Where this data is used, it does not generally form the main body of research and mostly confirms what is known from other sources. "Happily"--in the (rare) cases where Nazi findings are used, it's used with reluctance. There are evolving and hardening ethical codes around the use of this data as well, particularly from the 1980s onward; today, the use of any of this data must be explicitly detailed and the method of its collection is universally condemned. Most troublingly for the pursuit of truth and some kind of decency, this argument typically is used as an ahistorical tu quoque, as is being done in this case. It's not a particularly good argument, though--even were it more than if-you-squint-and-pick-and-choose true.
mehrdadn 7y ago
Also found some history here: https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/9yfn35/ip_theft_is_a_common_issue_in_a_historical/ https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/9yfn35/ip_thef... Edit: Question: In the post they talk about the Japanese taking photos of products. I'm not sure if I'm understanding what happened correctly, but if I am, shouldn't we make a distinction between just clever inference/reverse engineering (which is legal and done all the time) and outright IP theft/industrial espionage? I see IP theft/industrial espionage as being about stealing information not legally available to you, but reverse engineering and imitating a product are about trying to figure out how something works that you legally already have access to, and inferring things based on that. I feel like if a country has done the former, we shouldn't compare it to one that does the latter (currently apparently China)?
sschueller 7y ago
Also let's not forget about Operation Paperclip. You can toss the moral high ground out of the door. "Operation Paperclip was a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) largely carried out by Special Agents of Army CIC, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to America for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959. Many were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
- pjc50 7y ago
  The only unethical part of that was exempting them from war crimes trials; although I think that was only really relevant to those directly ordering the use of forced labour in the V2 programme. The rest were treated as some combination of prisoner of war, asylum seeker, and defector. They didn't exactly want to remain in Germany to be captured by the Soviets.
  - walshemj 7y ago
    And von Brun was arrested for complaining about the treatment of the labourers I belive.
aey 7y ago
Yes, and Britain had full sovereignty to defend itself. If the British chose not to, it’s because they valued trade with the US over the cost of IP. The US may choose the opposite with China.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Well, that was immediately after the UK had lost the war of independence, so their options may have been rather limited.
  - AlbertoGP 7y ago
    Yes, one example was the power loom which was out of their control once it arrived in the USA: “The Spies Who Launched America’s Industrial Revolution” https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur... “Among those sniffing out innovations across the Atlantic was Harvard graduate and Boston merchant, Francis Cabot Lowell. As the War of 1812 raged on, Lowell set sail from Great Britain in possession of the enemy’s most precious commercial secret. He carried with him pirated plans for Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, which had made Great Britain the world’s leading industrial power. Halfway across the Atlantic, a British frigate intercepted Lowell’s ship. Although the British double-searched his luggage and detained him for days, Lowell knew they would never find any evidence of espionage for he had hidden the plans in the one place they would never find them—inside his photographic mind. Unable to find any sign of spy craft, the British allowed Lowell to return to Boston, where he used Cartwright’s design to help propel the Industrial Revolution in the United States.”
deleted 7y ago
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i_am_proteus 7y ago
By this logic, one could justify chattel slavery in a modern country with an agrarian economy because that was US practice in 1787.
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  Yes, because saying that every rapidly developing country does IP theft as a way to speed up development, including the U.S., is exactly comparable. But if you do want to run with something as ridiculous, the U.S. holds the largest prison population on the planet and effectively forces them to do labor at a criminal hourly rate, you could say that's not as far from slavery as many would like to think.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    Don't overlook that all those criminals didn't become criminals involuntarily, like the slaves did.
    - AsyncAwait 7y ago
      Sure, am not suggesting it's exactly the same, not even close. But the treatment they get in prison, the fact that minorities are locked up at an alarming rate for drug possession, (not even distribution), the fact that they're used effectively as a slave labor force in many places, (laughable daily pay). Just because somebody's a criminal does not mean they're no longer human and arguably many of these locked up are there for crimes that we're starting to realize perhaps shouldn't be criminalized in the first place.
86carr 7y ago
That is a terrible article to base an argument on. You come off more as anti-american than open minded.
MR4D 7y ago
You're confusing two very different things: 1 - Stealing technology from one country and using it within your own country to increase your competitiveness. 2 - Stealing technology from one country and using it to build a competitive advantage for your firms in that first country (or any other country not your own). The first, depending one which treaties your country is a part of, may not even be considered stealing. The second clearly is.

yogthos 7y ago

Nobody is going to care about this in the long run, and it's pretty clear that China has already moved past US capabilities with tech like 5G. This will only spur more investment in domestic technology. China has a far better education system, a lot more people, and a government that's able to do long term planning. I expect them to leapfrog US within a decade or so.

mark_l_watson 7y ago
I tend to agree with you. I think you are saying that long term it is not a good idea to force economic adversaries to produce their own home grown tech. I have what is probably a bad analogy: it is like we are physically stronger now but we force economic adversaries to go work out at the gym and get in shape.
patentatt 7y ago
That overlooks the long history and cultural norm of borrowing or copying to advance. Chinese culture does not place the same value on pioneering as the US. If China does become a tech leader it will have to shift those deeply rooted cultural forces first. That, and their government that is capable of long term planning is also incapable of tolerating diversity, dissent, and free thought. I do not think China will become the technology leader you’re hypothesizing. Edit: Why don’t you ask the millions in the re-education camps how advanced China’s education system is?
- yogthos 7y ago
  Are we talking about the same China here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY
- NotPaidToPost 7y ago
  > Chinese culture does not place the same value on pioneering as the US. That's clearly not true and is visible everywhere in China. > is also incapable of tolerating diversity, dissent, and free thought. That's not true. Chinese culture tolerates diversity and uniqueness much more than Japanese culture, for example. Discussions would gain in value if people commented on what they have at least a modicum of knowledge about and were open to learn others' cultures.

simion314 7y ago

I am wondering if the huge IP theft is mostly propaganda similar to the one US uses before it starts a war or changes some government in other country.

craigsmansion 7y ago
It depends. The most well-known and common form of "IP theft" is cheaply made Chinese knock-offs that are forgeries. That's trademark infringement. It's not that big of a problem. What is an actual problematic form of "IP theft" is China appropriating trade-secrets. The bulk of "IP theft" that is used to fuel the current war of words seems to be patent infringement. Patent infringement sounds problematic, but really isn't. Even though China can produce devices that infringe, they can't sell those goods back to areas of the world where patent enforcement isn't as lax. They can sell them in China and that's a large market, but: - companies buying cheaply produced local copies weren't likely to buy the real thing in the first place. - Local copies are of inferior quality. By the time the local copies approach the quality of the original, they will be priced in the same ballpark as the original (and the original will be on the next generation). So yes, there is "IP theft" going on, but once again the term "IP" is being thrown around to obfuscate matters to support a political end and reality is quite a bit more complex but not as threatening as it's made out to be.
- patentatt 7y ago
  That ignores the advancing production capabilities and the vast grey market that moves goods into the US. That and the complacency of Amazon produce a situation where high quality knock offs can be made in China and find their way into the US market quite easily. Note: I’m speaking not of trademark infringement but patent infringement. It’s really no different. Patent infringement is problematic.
  - simion314 7y ago
    And instead of blocking the import of those fake products or the ones that infringe some IP (hopefully after you prove that) the US is blocking Huawei because of security concerns and instead of trying to find if there are backdoors in Huawei products, discussing how can we detect this backdoors, compare this backdoors with the ones in US products we are trying to switch the narative to the cheap Chinese products that are imported by US companies into US.

Zenst 7y ago

Maybe, but then historically - did China start stealing western IP or did the west? Silkworms, tea, pottery, gunpowder.... many things that got invented in China and in effect stolen by the west. So you could argue that the west gave China ammunition in the past to go down this route. Either way - the whole aspect of one country stealing another's secrets in regard to trade and product has a very long history. What the consumers (the ones affected) really need to be seeing though is a smoking gun. Whilst we are not talking WMD's here, we are talking about the same level of proof being bestowed upon the joe-public. That - does need to change and equally such evidence need to be credible with more than a grain of truth about it. Sure we have all read and heard and kinda-know what's going on and has gone on, but the public need to be told in a way that is clear cut and removes all doubt.

sanxiyn 7y ago
The west's stealing of silkworm (ca. 552) is a very interesting story. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_int...
- Zenst 7y ago
  Yes and many a well-done documentary telling the story. Though the story of how tea was smuggled out is one I've only recently become aware of and equally as fascinating. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea-heist-9866709/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea...
hahahaha23 7y ago
China smuggled sweet potato http://www.chinastudyabroad.org/indepthchina/1039-china-and-the-sweet-potato http://www.chinastudyabroad.org/indepthchina/1039-china-and-...

nicoburns 7y ago

Looking at it the other way: America has state sponsored restriction of free use of knowledge. IP law is considered important by America (and it has imposed this everywhere), but it is not straightforwardly a good thing (and I think most people would argue that copyright protection periods are currently too long)

sterlind 7y ago

Until now. The US seems to think Huawei poses a national security threat. Huawei seems to have won on 5G, to the point where UK is considering buying Huawei 5G equipment despite tons of pressure. Therefore, stealing the IP would be a national security priority. I'd bet dollars to donuts the NSA is trying to steal Huawei's 5G IP right now, though it'll be hard since they can't easily tap within China (no fiber links in friendly waters) and CIA's humint presence got rolled up when China hacked their network.

crazypyro 7y ago
I think it wouldn't be so unreasonable to assume someone in the US government IC has Huawei's IP already.
bugdd0 7y ago
They don't need to steal. They can just do the same they did to ZTE, they managed to install a person or two into their board of directors as part of the settlement of the dispute.

peteretep 7y ago

In before "America stole from the British so it's OK" comments! Ah, no, look, I'm three hours late. _А у вас негров линчуют_

throw667843 7y ago
It’s not OK, but it shows this is natural. Like Japan stealing IP in the 80s and South Korea in the 90s.

gloflo 7y ago

Oh look! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial... And no one can argue that the west including the US has given the rest of the world enough ammunition to feel a bit mistreated in the last centuries of exploitation.

AsyncAwait 7y ago

> American companies have for the most part not been engaging in wholesale state sponsored theft of Chinese IP. But they were in theft of European IP when the U.S. was at a similar developmental level than China is now.

mtw 7y ago

There is no wholesale theft. Theft is getting something against their will or them not knowing. China offered foreign corporations to open factories in China, under the condition that's it's done with a local partner. Western companies put IP, funds and many other assets in the joint venture, willingly. This is the same as American corporations selling tanks and planes to Israel. Now look right now and you have Israeli companies producing latest-gen weapons, with a large portion integrating American design and IP. Where is the outrage? If you are thinking about groups of hackers hacking into networks and stealing plans and designs, we're more at the stage of McCarthyism hysteria or anti-japanese sentiments in the 80-90s. So far, what's more obvious is state-sponsored Russian hackers, and a bit behind Israeli hackers. Now at the individual level or at corporation level, it is true there are cases of theft. For example, there are blatant copies of the Mercedes G-Wagon, many other cars and products. Chinese will get a copy of your product and will find a way to sell you a copy for 1/3rd the price. There is no wholesale state sponsored theft, and a large percentage of Chinese companies actually follow the law. I think people must be very careful currently. You're just being a mouthpiece for Steve Bannon and Trump by writing "wholesale state sponsored theft"

jacquesm 7y ago

> American companies have for the most part not been engaging in wholesale state sponsored theft of Chinese IP. That's because the Chinese don't have IP worth stealing. But there have been quite a few documented cases of the US stealing IP from European countries that they thought was worth stealing...