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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 th
by 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 agoThat 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 agoAnd 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.
- simonh 7y agoA lot of this takes the form of a Western company contracting a Chinese manufacturer to make some goods for it. The company pays for research and development, specialist tooling and such. They contract the factory to make 10,000 widgets. They then find thousands of the exact same widgets on the market in China. The factory just makes more and sells them directly.
- simion314 7y agoIs this illegal in China? If yes is there an example of someone trying to get justice for this?