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It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff. That's how humanity has innovated throughout the ages: Copy what works and innov

It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff. That's how humanity has innovated throughout the ages: Copy what works and innovate on top of it. None of our inventions arise from a vacuum. Cars are still as wide as Roman chariots for good reason. Power transfer uses the same base principles as were in play during the dawn of steam engines and before. Energy conversion has been an iterative process for centuries, with the odd leap and bound. Industrial espionage exists because it works, and everyone does it because it's a cheap way to come up to speed with the leading edge of human knowledge rather than unnecessarily duplicating effort. Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
The absurdity of the "it's stealing" position is obvious when you imagine what the world would look like if everybody suddenly decided each country is doing only their own research and is not allowed to use any external idea. It would be utterly ridiculous. Copying-and-improving is the default, it's what makes us move forward as humanity. Everything else is just politics and national pride.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  "They're only copying" was also an accusation famously leveled by Britain against the US (see Lowell[1] and The Pirates of Penzance[2]) and by the US against Japan around the turn of the 20th century. Copying complex technologies is hard and countries that are able to succeed at it usually go on to become innovative. [1]https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance#Backgr...
  - tbihl 5y ago
    The US would then turn around and copy Japanese submarines in 1940s and 50s after the war (admittedly a smaller amount than what they copied from German designs.)
iso1210 5y ago
> Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else. It's also exactly what made nasa in the first place, with America stealing much of rocket science from the Germans in the wake of WW2.
- brobdingnagians 5y ago
  I was just telling my wife about this yesterday and how Wernher von Braun basically saved the US rocket program; or, at least, it was having major difficulties before, and major successes after he joined up. And, in addition, the Germans in the 1930s got a lot of good information from Robert H. Goddard, the inventor who built the first liquid-fueled rocket; Werner von Braun said, about him, "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles." There was a large exchange of information in most areas of physics between very illustrious German and American physicists. I think that having more people doing more science enriches everyone. Without American and German scientists working sharing information, it would have taken a lot longer to have the space technology that we currently do. That is true even when two countries have political tension, as Germany and America had in the 1930s. China may have political rivalry with America, but science should take a lead in exchanging ideas, learning from each other, and developing new ideas that will enrich all of humanity.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - fsloth 5y ago
    Not only that, but the project director of the friggin Saturn V - Arthur Rudolph - was forced to rescind his US citizenship or face charges for war crimes because he had managed a factory during the war - Mittelwerk - that killed more forced labourers by building the V-2 than died in the V-2 bombings (20,000 vs 9,000 V-2 casualties). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelwerk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelwerk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora_concentration_c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket
ridiculous_lol 5y ago
Precisely. Instead of crying the same people should question their Government on why the tech wasn't protected enough if it was not supposed to be copied.
tgv 5y ago
Not directly relevant to this case, since I don't know anything about these Mars rovers than the superficial stuff from news outlets, but I think that what hurts isn't the copying, but boasting about it, presenting it as your own, not acknowledging the source, etc. A trivial example: a nephew of mine proudly showed his drawings. They were really fantastic for his age, and everyone told him so. Turns out, he drew them by putting paper on a computer monitor (this was back when CRTs were still the fashion) and tracing. That did change the perception of merit a bit. The difference in the difficulty underlies the difference in appreciation. To make my stance entirely clear: this is not meant to condone or condemn either side.
- adolph 5y ago
  Hockney derived a new theory of art and optics: around 1430, centuries before anyone suspected it, artists began secretly using cameralike devices, including the lens, the concave mirror and the camera obscura, to help them make realistic-looking paintings. ... Hockney suggests, knew the magic of photographic projection. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/arts/paintings-too-perfect-the-great-optics-debate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/arts/paintings-too-perfec... T. S. Eliot’s dictum: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.” https://www.uvu.edu/arts/applause/posts/stealing.html https://www.uvu.edu/arts/applause/posts/stealing.html
throwaway051521 5y ago
Is there any evidence that there's copying going on? I tried searching online, but couldn't find any. A few months ago I saw people claiming that the leading choice in the contest to name the rover was "Perseverance"[1], which wasn't actually true (see the comment about how 弘毅 is translated). There seems to be a lot of misinformation out there these days. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/konwyz/starship_starlink_and_launch_megathread_links/gjr3d8l/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/konwyz/starship_sta...
- rlonn 5y ago
  The rover has wheels, right? That's clearly copying previous efforts.
ta_ca 5y ago
in my opinion africa should ditch everything and focus on copyright business. since this all started there, they would be the richest continent in no time.
rootsudo 5y ago
In a sense, it's good competition makes for a good game and achieving greater goals. e.g. Soviet Union vs United States. I like it, I welcome it - it begs to open the purse and spend and brings the most creative solutions to the table. Like computers, boy what a fad!
amelius 5y ago
> It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff. Wasn't it an American who said "good artists copy, great artists steal"?
- tomelgin 5y ago
  And the American who said it stole that phrase from a Spaniard (Steve Jobs popularized it but he was quoting Pablo Picasso).
BobbyJo 5y ago
> Copy what works and innovate on top of it I think the main gripe with China's process is that they don't do the latter. They produce replica's then herald them as original works of the mightiest country on the planet. Everyone everywhere steals, but China does it with a little more 'F-U' than most countries, and tend to use what they steal to oppress. I spent a few years working for a defense contractor out of college, and Chinese IPs were probing every internet facing server we had 24/7. https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/chinese-knockoffs-us-weapons/ https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/chinese-knock... https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-is-working-on-what-looks-like-a-clone-of-spacexs-starship https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-is-working-on-what-looks... > Industrial Espionage.... > Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else. Pointing it out as a matter of economic and national security is far from a childish thing to do. If you're government is willing to subjugate people into slave labor at a massive scale while at the same time stealing the IP born from fairer societies, that creates an uneven competitive landscape, which ultimately works against the fairer societies. Think of it this way: Safety nets cost money, but the return you get is smarter people taking bigger risks and creating new useful things. If you get all the benefits of that (IP) and don't have to pay, you will win, and create a crappier world in the process. I'd liken it to brain drain. You spend all this money educating people only to have the return on that investment go elsewhere. I know the immediate response to this is going to be "But America did such and such...". I don't care what America did. When someone is on trial for stealing a car, talking about how someone else stole a bike isn't a defense.
- Ziggy_Zaggy 5y ago
  This response it exactly correct. Thanks for taking the time to spell this out.
- rland 5y ago
  America literally did exactly what China is doing now, when it was the upstart and Britain was the industrial powerhouse of the world. Americans stole British IP and built an industrial economy with that technology. All the while implementing perhaps the largest and cruelest human trafficking operation ever conceived. How are all the other countries, who follow US IP laws and trade regulations, pulling themselves out of poverty? Are they doing it as fast as China is? It is always in the interest of a more developed country to set IP terms, because they own the patents and the manufacturing processes, and they can advantage themselves at the expense of everyone else. Look at how Mexico fared in NAFTA, or what the terms of the TPP were. All of this is completely beside the point of who has a more "fair" or more "just" regime. China did what they needed to do to develop their economy: steal American IP and ignore American trade laws and patents.
908B64B197 5y ago
The problem is IP theft hurts novel research, since illegal knock-off makers don't have to recoup their R&D investments.
badmadrad 5y ago
The fact your comment is upvoted says all you need to know about the parcipatants in this thread. China merely isn't just engaged in industrial espionage because it works to not duplicate effort. They steal to undermine the effort of the people that made it possible to begin with. In many cases ruining the companies that made the original innovation. This isnt crying and whinging for no reason it's unethical and wrong. This isnt a two way street where chinese innovations are helping our world. Almost everything the Chinese steal all while burning through natural resources and at alarming pace and injecting the most harmful substances into the environment. And be honest they are simply doing this to saberrattle the US and create propoganda to legitmaze an oppressive state. So, yes it's not only unfair, it's evil. And I'm not happy for China.

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago

The absurdity of the "it's stealing" position is obvious when you imagine what the world would look like if everybody suddenly decided each country is doing only their own research and is not allowed to use any external idea. It would be utterly ridiculous. Copying-and-improving is the default, it's what makes us move forward as humanity. Everything else is just politics and national pride.

Symmetry 5y ago
"They're only copying" was also an accusation famously leveled by Britain against the US (see Lowell[1] and The Pirates of Penzance[2]) and by the US against Japan around the turn of the 20th century. Copying complex technologies is hard and countries that are able to succeed at it usually go on to become innovative. [1]https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance#Backgr...
- tbihl 5y ago
  The US would then turn around and copy Japanese submarines in 1940s and 50s after the war (admittedly a smaller amount than what they copied from German designs.)

iso1210 5y ago

> Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else. It's also exactly what made nasa in the first place, with America stealing much of rocket science from the Germans in the wake of WW2.

brobdingnagians 5y ago
I was just telling my wife about this yesterday and how Wernher von Braun basically saved the US rocket program; or, at least, it was having major difficulties before, and major successes after he joined up. And, in addition, the Germans in the 1930s got a lot of good information from Robert H. Goddard, the inventor who built the first liquid-fueled rocket; Werner von Braun said, about him, "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles." There was a large exchange of information in most areas of physics between very illustrious German and American physicists. I think that having more people doing more science enriches everyone. Without American and German scientists working sharing information, it would have taken a lot longer to have the space technology that we currently do. That is true even when two countries have political tension, as Germany and America had in the 1930s. China may have political rivalry with America, but science should take a lead in exchanging ideas, learning from each other, and developing new ideas that will enrich all of humanity.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fsloth 5y ago
  Not only that, but the project director of the friggin Saturn V - Arthur Rudolph - was forced to rescind his US citizenship or face charges for war crimes because he had managed a factory during the war - Mittelwerk - that killed more forced labourers by building the V-2 than died in the V-2 bombings (20,000 vs 9,000 V-2 casualties). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelwerk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelwerk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora_concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora_concentration_c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket

ridiculous_lol 5y ago

Precisely. Instead of crying the same people should question their Government on why the tech wasn't protected enough if it was not supposed to be copied.

tgv 5y ago

Not directly relevant to this case, since I don't know anything about these Mars rovers than the superficial stuff from news outlets, but I think that what hurts isn't the copying, but boasting about it, presenting it as your own, not acknowledging the source, etc. A trivial example: a nephew of mine proudly showed his drawings. They were really fantastic for his age, and everyone told him so. Turns out, he drew them by putting paper on a computer monitor (this was back when CRTs were still the fashion) and tracing. That did change the perception of merit a bit. The difference in the difficulty underlies the difference in appreciation. To make my stance entirely clear: this is not meant to condone or condemn either side.

adolph 5y ago
Hockney derived a new theory of art and optics: around 1430, centuries before anyone suspected it, artists began secretly using cameralike devices, including the lens, the concave mirror and the camera obscura, to help them make realistic-looking paintings. ... Hockney suggests, knew the magic of photographic projection. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/arts/paintings-too-perfect-the-great-optics-debate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/arts/paintings-too-perfec... T. S. Eliot’s dictum: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.” https://www.uvu.edu/arts/applause/posts/stealing.html https://www.uvu.edu/arts/applause/posts/stealing.html

throwaway051521 5y ago

Is there any evidence that there's copying going on? I tried searching online, but couldn't find any. A few months ago I saw people claiming that the leading choice in the contest to name the rover was "Perseverance"[1], which wasn't actually true (see the comment about how 弘毅 is translated). There seems to be a lot of misinformation out there these days. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/konwyz/starship_starlink_and_launch_megathread_links/gjr3d8l/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/konwyz/starship_sta...

rlonn 5y ago
The rover has wheels, right? That's clearly copying previous efforts.

ta_ca 5y ago

in my opinion africa should ditch everything and focus on copyright business. since this all started there, they would be the richest continent in no time.

rootsudo 5y ago

In a sense, it's good competition makes for a good game and achieving greater goals. e.g. Soviet Union vs United States. I like it, I welcome it - it begs to open the purse and spend and brings the most creative solutions to the table. Like computers, boy what a fad!

amelius 5y ago

> It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff. Wasn't it an American who said "good artists copy, great artists steal"?

tomelgin 5y ago
And the American who said it stole that phrase from a Spaniard (Steve Jobs popularized it but he was quoting Pablo Picasso).

BobbyJo 5y ago

> Copy what works and innovate on top of it I think the main gripe with China's process is that they don't do the latter. They produce replica's then herald them as original works of the mightiest country on the planet. Everyone everywhere steals, but China does it with a little more 'F-U' than most countries, and tend to use what they steal to oppress. I spent a few years working for a defense contractor out of college, and Chinese IPs were probing every internet facing server we had 24/7. https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/chinese-knockoffs-us-weapons/ https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/chinese-knock... https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-is-working-on-what-looks-like-a-clone-of-spacexs-starship https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-is-working-on-what-looks... > Industrial Espionage.... > Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else. Pointing it out as a matter of economic and national security is far from a childish thing to do. If you're government is willing to subjugate people into slave labor at a massive scale while at the same time stealing the IP born from fairer societies, that creates an uneven competitive landscape, which ultimately works against the fairer societies. Think of it this way: Safety nets cost money, but the return you get is smarter people taking bigger risks and creating new useful things. If you get all the benefits of that (IP) and don't have to pay, you will win, and create a crappier world in the process. I'd liken it to brain drain. You spend all this money educating people only to have the return on that investment go elsewhere. I know the immediate response to this is going to be "But America did such and such...". I don't care what America did. When someone is on trial for stealing a car, talking about how someone else stole a bike isn't a defense.

Ziggy_Zaggy 5y ago
This response it exactly correct. Thanks for taking the time to spell this out.
rland 5y ago
America literally did exactly what China is doing now, when it was the upstart and Britain was the industrial powerhouse of the world. Americans stole British IP and built an industrial economy with that technology. All the while implementing perhaps the largest and cruelest human trafficking operation ever conceived. How are all the other countries, who follow US IP laws and trade regulations, pulling themselves out of poverty? Are they doing it as fast as China is? It is always in the interest of a more developed country to set IP terms, because they own the patents and the manufacturing processes, and they can advantage themselves at the expense of everyone else. Look at how Mexico fared in NAFTA, or what the terms of the TPP were. All of this is completely beside the point of who has a more "fair" or more "just" regime. China did what they needed to do to develop their economy: steal American IP and ignore American trade laws and patents.

908B64B197 5y ago

The problem is IP theft hurts novel research, since illegal knock-off makers don't have to recoup their R&D investments.

badmadrad 5y ago

The fact your comment is upvoted says all you need to know about the parcipatants in this thread. China merely isn't just engaged in industrial espionage because it works to not duplicate effort. They steal to undermine the effort of the people that made it possible to begin with. In many cases ruining the companies that made the original innovation. This isnt crying and whinging for no reason it's unethical and wrong. This isnt a two way street where chinese innovations are helping our world. Almost everything the Chinese steal all while burning through natural resources and at alarming pace and injecting the most harmful substances into the environment. And be honest they are simply doing this to saberrattle the US and create propoganda to legitmaze an oppressive state. So, yes it's not only unfair, it's evil. And I'm not happy for China.