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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
by 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 agoHuh? No, I'm trying not to be a hypocrite.
- throwaway-hn123 7y agoOh do shut up, you trivial little moron.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoWhich part is misinformation?
- leereeves 7y agoAnd 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 agoThey 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 agoAs 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 agoByzantines robbed the silkworms in possibly one of the oldest written records of corporate espionage?
- Zenst 7y agoI 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 agoGunpowder 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 agoInformation 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 agoNot 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 agoAlso 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 agoAlso 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 agoThe 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 agoAnd von Brun was arrested for complaining about the treatment of the labourers I belive.
- aey 7y agoYes, 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 agoWell, that was immediately after the UK had lost the war of independence, so their options may have been rather limited.
- AlbertoGP 7y agoYes, 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 agoBy this logic, one could justify chattel slavery in a modern country with an agrarian economy because that was US practice in 1787.
- AsyncAwait 7y agoYes, 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 agoDon't overlook that all those criminals didn't become criminals involuntarily, like the slaves did.
- AsyncAwait 7y agoSure, 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 agoThat is a terrible article to base an argument on. You come off more as anti-american than open minded.
- MR4D 7y agoYou'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.