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The US wants IP laws so it can protect it's innovation. The rest of the Western world agrees. The US is also more likely to maintain human rights, which China

• encryptluks2 5y ago
  Go to a prison in the Midwest and ask prisoners about their human rights. The US is full of abuse, but the wealthy are really good at pretending it doesn't exist and the poor are so busy fighting with the middle class that they don't have the time or money to do anything about it.
  • km3r 5y ago
    No one's is claiming the US is anywhere near perfect, but the question is do we let China win or the US. And if that question doesn't have an obvious answer to you, you just haven't been paying attention. We have more freedom, more rights, and aren't actively genociding minority populations. We have our flaws, and we absolutely should strive to be better, but I would much rather be under American rule than China.
    • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      The US got off with 100 years of IP theft in the 19th century. Now the door should be closed to keep anyone else from doing the same?
      • gtirloni 5y ago
        Yes? Why perpetuate a bad thing?
        • betterunix2 5y ago
          The concept of "intellectual property" is a novel myth circulated by the industries that benefit from it, and it always has been. There was a time before copyrights, and I personally think we are already living in a post-copyright age (and, for all their complaining, the major copyright industries seem to agree -- why else pursue things like DRM?). Some future generation is going to be scratching their heads trying to figure out why this current generation wasted so much time, effort, and money trying to stop everyone from using the most effective copying machines ever conceived of to make copies of things.
          • fortuna86 5y ago
            Except for now when China is done stealing and has something to protect, they are all about it. https://www.ft.com/content/c78b69e3-82bd-4f72-881c-12b2ca1ce926 https://www.ft.com/content/c78b69e3-82bd-4f72-881c-12b2ca1ce...
            • Fricken 5y ago
              Have you heard of Sam Slater, the father of the American factory system? He's a hero in America for stealing IP from Britain, where he was known as "Slater the Traitor"
              • fortuna86 5y ago
                Have you heard of Louis Pasteur? He discovered Germ Theory in 1861. This man or his legacy is of course is not what we're talking about, which is why I bring it up. To change the subject.
      • ineedasername 5y ago
        Large scale international IP Treaties weren't really a thing until the near the end of the the 19th century, so "theft" isn't really the correct term when there were no agreements or laws governing trans-national IP rights. Those agreements really only got started with the Berne Convention-- mainly creative works-- and the Paris Convention-- basically industrial patents. (Yes there were some other smaller agreements before, but these brought things into much larger scale with many, many more signatories to the agreements) Besides, your line of reasoning amounts to "Other people got away with bad things so it's not fair that I do to" As a parent, I spot that line of logic often in with my kids, and it doesn't hold together very well there either.
  • weq 5y ago
    Prison vs Forced labour camps that keep you alive just long enough to sell off your organs to the highest bidder. China definiately has the upper hand when it comes to exploiting the natural human resources that would otherwise be thorns in the political landscape.
    • trasz 5y ago
      Many American prisons are forced labour camps.
  • techrat 5y ago
    This sort of whataboutism isn't an argument, but a concession to the person you're replying to. Instead of meeting an example with a counter, all you've done in this conversation is show that there are now TWO examples.
    • esailija 5y ago
      The OP explicitly claimed that US cares about human rights. So no it is not "whataboutism", which a bs term anyway because it is almost always used in situations where someone implicitly claims that the US cares about human rights and that's why US atrocities must be brought up as counterargument.
  • ineedasername 5y ago
    All you've done is acknowledge that China has a bad record on human rights while saying that some prisoners in the US are also not treated well. So you have effectively conceded the issue with respect to China, while the rest is "but the US also does bad things". I also think the comparison is wrong to begin with: I doubt you will find prisons in China that allow inmates to have a TV in their cell, or access to Xbox or other videogames.
  • alasdair_ 5y ago
    Midwest prisons don’t typically harvest the organs of their prisoners.
• syshum 5y ago
  Seems like a false dilemma fallacy to me.. Why cant we just acknowledge that both are bad.
  • kerng 5y ago
    I think the comment you replied to said pretty much that - both bad, but one is worse
• Aunche 5y ago
  > The US is also more likely to maintain human rights, which China absolutely does not care about. No nation genuinely cares about human rights, especially the US. They have toppled way too many governments and installed way too many dictators to claim otherwise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...). The US is relatively "nice" right now, which means that we're skip the second step of appointing a dictator. Even then, it's not because American leaders suddenly became nicer, it's because unlike their Chinese counterparts, they don't have any real long-term goals. If they get into another Cold War or feel the need for a canal in another nation, they'll go right back to being evil again.
  • buran77 5y ago
    > unlike their Chinese counterparts, they don't have any real long-term goals China's long term goal is to become the top superpower. USA's long term goal is to stay the top superpower. Everything else flows from this but it should be very clear that "staying in power" is very much a real goal on any horizon. It also involves a lot of military, economic, and political effort. As a democracy the US can't have an equally concentrated aim but as the saying goes, getting to the top is easy, staying at the top is hard. The biggest difference is really that the US is already in a top position, and a good chunk of the world, particularly the EU, have interests that are mostly aligned with the US. When they're not it usually takes no more than a bit of economic and political pressure from the US to get the desired results. China does not have this support. The Western world does not have any reason to trust them, no real "relationship", and no guarantee that China would be a "benevolent dictator" like the US. I say "dictator" because the US successfully imposed its views/demands on the Western world almost whenever this was needed by dangling a tiny carrot and a giant stick, a situation most of the world is more or less comfortable with. So no reason to take chances on a country that could forgo the carrot completely, or just have completely misaligned interests. To the point, people are arguing that China could use Chinese companies to undermine a foreign country, clearly making them a no go for anything secure. In contrast we also know that for all intents and purposes the US can do and did the same with US based companies. It's just about picking the view that supports your personal beliefs and interests. As a regular person, would you rather be spied on by the US via Cisco or by China via Huawei? As the US government this understandably isn't even a question.
• freeopinion 5y ago
  Can we nominate a third party? How about Taiwan or New Zealand? Can we vote for Spain? The US wants to keep a lock on all future innovations. They want to maintain their seat. They want to create any barrier to entry that will help them keep living high on the hog. But if an HIV vaccine were invented in China today, the USA would do everything they could to steal it or invalidate any patents on it. The U.S. is opposed to Chinese stealing ideas from a U.S. company. Except for the part of the U.S. that didn't own stock in the U.S. company but does own stock in the Chinese company. And of course everyone in the U.S. who can buy the Chinese product cheaper than the U.S. product.
  • ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
    > But if an HIV vaccine were invented in China today, the USA would do everything they could to steal it or invalidate any patents on it. This seems to not match the behavior that we actually see in other fields. In the situation of folding smartphones, for example, the first manufacturer was Korean. The Chinese solution was to poach staff and steal trade secrets from a contract manufacturer, while the US solution has been to just buy the resulting devices as consumer products.
• makeitdouble 5y ago
  > The US wants IP laws so it can protect it's innovation. Parent's point is that US wants IP laws mostly because it has a trove of extremely valuable IPs and is in the leading position far ahead of any other player. The same way Disney wants strong copyright and trademark protection, with low labor protection, lax tax enforcement etc. They would have different demands and priorities if they were still scrapping existing IPs from the public domain.
• dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. We don't want this sort of generic flamewar tangent here—they're extremely predictable and therefore tedious, and they nearly always turn nasty. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html