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China’s war chest of rare earth patents
- clearwinners 7y agoHow do patents work at an international level? Isn’t there a lot of shade thrown at the government of China for the behavior of its citizens and party members often flouting intellectual property agreements to begin with? Obviously, the real world operates according to behavioral rules, where a reward will be obtained if left freely available, unchecked. People do whatever they want, unless consequences or available resources impose limitation. So, what’s a patent worth, besides the simple merit of institutionalized memory of discovery and invention? I’m not sure why there’s this idea of fighting battles with an arm tied behind your back.
- x3n0ph3n3 7y agoWhy should anyone respect China's patents when they flout patent law that puts them at a disadvantage?
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoBecause we aspire to the rule of law, even if they don't.
- RobertRoberts 7y agoWhile I completely agree that the US should aspire to hold the law in high regard, there is plenty of cases where it's disregarded against bad actors. Consider the sanctions against countries (Iran comes to mind at the moment) where that country is not allowed to pursue perfectly legal actions because of 3rd party pressure. Sanctions against China won't work though because their international political clout. But since much of the rare earth patents are probably needed for making defense systems, I think it can easily be set aside as a "national security", "self defense", etc... I am sure a savvy lawyer could come up with the argument.
- mullingitover 7y ago> But since much of the rare earth patents are probably needed for making defense systems, I think it can easily be set aside as a "national security", "self defense", etc... I am sure a savvy lawyer could come up with the argument. We can desire to violate the treaties to our hearts' content, but if we don't actually have the elements the patents are referencing we won't be able to violate any of the patents.
- RobertRoberts 7y agoRare earth metals are _not_ uncommon, we have tons of them in the US, just not the processing capacity. Which is already starting to change.
- mullingitover 7y agoIndeed, but even for example with a wartime suspension of their patents, we would be cut off from supplies immediately and it could potentially take years for our domestic pipeline to start delivering. Without the wartime excuse I don't foresee it getting any better for the speed at which we can start mining (pretty sure it would take multiple acts of congress to allow for the environmental regs to be ignored), and if we start violating China's rare earth patents willy-nilly I don't picture them helping us with that by continuing to sell the raw materials to us.
- RobertRoberts 7y agoSure, but until there's war, patents are just a business issue, not a catastrophic one. So there really is no issues here accept who makes more money.
- gpm 7y agoChanging the law is allowed within the rule of law, which is what I read gp as suggesting, so I'm not sure this is an answer.
- coldtea 7y ago"Because we now need the rule of this particular law, even if they don't. Of course, when we didn't need it, we broke it like crazy ourselves, like we were tariff crazy back in the day (but now we are against them), and like all our other international transgressions (supporting dictators, toppling governments, secret sites, etc), or lack of "aspiring" for the rule of law in other matters, including not signing child labor treaties or environmental ones everybody else in the west signed" -- that would be more like it.
- mullingitover 7y agoThe US did the same thing until it didn't. Should everyone ignore US patents because we flouted everyone else's for a century?
- product50 7y agoWhose patents did US flout?
- shagie 7y agohttps://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/07/05/americas-industrial-revolution-based-trade-secret-theft/id=85377/ https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/07/05/americas-industrial-re... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-espionage-started-americas-cotton-revolution-180967608/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-esp... https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/ (this one is specifically in context of China) This was before patents were well codified - instead it was trade secrets and guilds. It was still intellectual property theft.
- learc83 7y agoSlater was a British citizen who was prohibited by law from leaving Britain. He left under an assumed identity and set up shop in the US. This is not an example of the US engaging in industrial espionage or IP theft itself. We don't even know if Slater himself committed what we would call IP theft. From your first article: >Looking back, we can’t really conclude whether Samuel Slater’s actions would have qualified as trade secret misappropriation under modern laws. We don’t know, for example, how much of his work that first year resulted from his skills and general knowledge about the physics of spinning cotton and about pre-existing mechanical techniques. All of that was his to use freely. And we don’t know to what extent the success of his mills was due to improvements that he came up with on his own. There was a deputy treasury secretary who posted bounties looking for British cotton mill operators, but that seemingly never came of anything. That is better evidence of direct wrongdoing by the US. However, the US hadn't signed any treaties honoring British IP law yet and most European powers were doing the exact same thing at the time. >While the first U.S. patent act, in 1790, specified that "any person or persons" could file a patent, it was changed in 1793 to make clear that only U.S. citizens could claim U.S. patent protection. >China’s modern trade and patent regimes are similarly tilted against outsiders. The US in 1793 hadn't signed a treaty preventing them from limiting patent protection to US citizens. China has signed treaties promising to treat patent applications by petitioners from signatory states the same as domestic petitioners, and as your article points out they do not.
- omegaworks 7y agoThis is precisely what negotiation in good faith is meant to resolve.
- Nasrudith 7y agoWell for one not doing so is a fast way to essentially instalose the argument by undermine the legitimacy of their complaints - it makes the whole complaint look like a pretext.
- williesleg 7y agoI don't care about China's shit parents the USA needs to invalidate them all. Just like what they do.
- jaimex2 7y agoWhat are the chances the US government can put pressure on the patent office to invalidate said patents?
- H8crilA 7y agoOr, maybe, you know, let's keep the world trading peacefully, letting every corner of the world do and sell what they're best at?
- analognoise 7y agoI'd rather we push China's head underwater until they come up a Democracy. They have 1 million people in camps, they're clearly messing with Hong Kong, and they've even pissed off their neighbors by building islands and claiming shared territory. They severely persecute a number of groups, including religious ones. I wouldn't want to do business with Nazi Germany either. Let's crush them economically, break their spine without firing a shot. They're already acting like thugs to business people and are scaring off investment. Hopefully foreign money gets wise and goes elsewhere.
- mighty_bander 7y agoI don't get why you're downvoted. You're telling the truth about human rights abuses. Who the hell finds this objectionable? I guess the "head underwater" thing is a little extreme but there are people getting the shit kicked out of then right now for peacefully protesting in favour of democracy.
- CamperBob2 7y agoWho the hell finds this objectionable? The Chinese?
- turndown 7y agoThe Chinese != CPC.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y agoI don't know about rare earth patents, but in software, I have first hand experience in seeing just how trivial patents can be. I've seen patents so trivial, you could write the essence of it in One short line of javascript code. The patent office doesn't seem to take the "must be non-trivial" part of the patent requirement seriously at all. Handing out monopolies for trivial ideas, left and right, isn't going to end well. Even joel Spolsky said 99.9% of the software patents out there were trivial.
- patentatt 7y agoThere isn’t a “must be non-trivial” requirement of patents. The broadest statement in 35 USC 101 can be boiled down to “new” which is interpreted as “novel and non-obvious.” If these “trivial” patents are “novel and non-obvious” then they are likely eligible for parenting in the US.
- dmritard96 7y agoWithout respecting US IP, hard to imagine there will be a lot of respect for Chinese IP from the US. Maybe it doesn't matter?
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoYeah, TBH stating that China's patents are a threat belies a complete misunderstanding of how geopolitics works.
- bin0 7y agoI'm not sure about this one. One of America's virtues is that she tries to play by the rules (emphasis on "tries", though). It's why we follow the Geneva Conventions. I really, really don't like China, but I also have a bit of a visceral reaction to the "two-wrongs-make-a-right" mindset that seems to underlie this statement. However, the question also becomes important: if China stole American IP to develop these patents, does she have any right to them? I'd analogize this to the legal precedent of "fruit of the poisonous tree". This precedent states that cops can't raid your home without a warrant, find evidence, and use it against you: they obtained that evidence in an illegitimate fashion, so it's no longer valid. I could rationalize that if China stole our tech to develop hers, she has no right to that tech in the first place.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y agoThere are two problems with your statement: 1. If the United States does not honor Chinese IP, that calls into question all patents in the United States. It sends a message that American courts will ignore intellectual property when the US government tells them to. Law becomes political and arbitrary. 2. Discussion of Chinese non-respect for IP is hugely overblown. Compared to other developing countries, Chinese IP enforcement is actually fairly good, and it's been improving rapidly over the past several years. Nowadays, Western companies regularly sue over IP in Chinese courts, and they usually win. China is one of the largest venues for IP litigation in the world now. Given the huge volume of patent royalties that American companies earn in China, it would be very foolish for the US to blow up the global patent system. The US probably has more to lose here, given that it's a more developed country with more IP.
- igravious 7y agoTo get a sense of the severity of the problem check out this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_mineral#/media/File:USGS_rare_earth_oxides_production_graph.PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_mineral#/media/File... Couple that total production dominance with the upswing in patent applications and this could spell trouble.
- rrggrr 7y agoRare earths are a key source of foreign currency for China, currency is presently needs to import all manner of products globally. But China is hard at work trying to make the RMB a global currency - most recently through a gold/oil/RMB market. So, understand that once the RMB ascends to a status similar to the EUR or USD you will rare earth prices skyrocket and patents enforced.