27 ms·

You are correct, but I dislike the tone that what they do is "typically Chinese" or what Chinese do. * When Chinese were ahead, European stole and smuggled man

• rscho 5y ago
  China never was ahead.
• patrickk 5y ago
  Chinese price dumping from state-sponsored companies also largely wiped out the German solar PV industry[1,2]. Germany was an early innovator in solar, especially in regards to inventing the concept of a feed in tariff when solar PV was still hideously expensive, thereby driving wider adoption. Planet Money did a nice podcast on the history of it [3]. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-exports-crushing-german-solar-industry/a-16031596 https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-exports-crushing-german-solar-... [2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/last-major-german-solar-cell-maker-surrenders-chinese-competition https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/last-major-german-solar... [3] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/17/797322305/episode-965-das-green-old-deal https://www.npr.org/2020/01/17/797322305/episode-965-das-gre...
  • Dah00n 5y ago
    >state-sponsored companies Your comment reads as if there's something wrong with state-sponsored companies but there really aren't and everyone does this including the US and Germany. How they do it might differ but the end result is the same. Directly, tax cuts, giving foreign aid that have strings attached like the US does with almost all its "aid" ("we give you $XXX million and you agree to use it to buy from US defense contractors A, B and C" isn't aid - it is state-sponsoring of companies). It is only seen as a problem in the West when done by a country like PRC and it hurts a company in a country like the US or Germany - never the other way around. I don't know what to call it but it smells like a mix of nationalism and racism.
    • encoderer 5y ago
      [flagged]
      • dang 5y ago
        Nationalistic flamewar comments like this one will get you banned here, regardless of which country you have a problem with. That's because nationalistic flamewars are among the most repetitive and nastiest discussions the internet has to serve up. This is exactly what we don't want on this site, so please don't do it again. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    • prewett 5y ago
      I think the difference is what the effect is. If China or the US or whoever subsidizes its own industry, people complain but it's not a big deal. I've never really heard any complaints about any of China's state-owned enterprises. Nobody complains that China sells electricity inside China for less than the cost of production; nobody complains about US farm subsidies. What people complain about is when it alters market dynamics. Selling solar panels below the cost of production (I assume that's what happened) upsets people.
      • Balvarez 5y ago
        I think Mexican corn farmers would disagree with you on US farm subsidies.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • yls 5y ago
    IIRC Germany, by subsidizing its solar PV industry too heavily, took the innovation pressure out of the latter. This made it way too easy for Chinese companies to take over the market.
  • croes 5y ago
    You forgot german politicians that helped killing it, to protect the long-established energy suppliers. Peter Altmaier is one of those politicians.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Yeah they pretty much did the same in the USA as well.
• elteto 5y ago
  [flagged]
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Piracy is not a theft in a sense that it's just illegal, not fundamentally immoral. Piracy is definitely a theft. It’s ludicrous to suggest that IP doesn’t have any value like physical property.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    IP is a government-granted privilege, that is why the word "royalties" is derived from the word "royal". In Great Britain of the 18th century, where the concept began, the one who guaranteed your IP rights was the Sovereign and his/her courts. There isn't anything like IP in the Common Law or other traditional legal systems, while ownership of physical property dates at least until Antiquity. Two very different concepts. I am not against IP as such, but violation of a legally guaranteed monopoly, even though it causes some loss of capturable value, isn't the same as theft/larceny. Words have meanings and we should respect them. Piracy is legally similar to a non-organized blacksmith setting up shop in a city where every blacksmith must be member of a certain guild to work. This kind of monopoly was routinely granted before by either the Sovereign or particular cities.
    • wwtrv 5y ago
      > Piracy is legally similar to a non-organized blacksmith setting up shop in a city where every blacksmith must be member of a certain guild to work. No. It’s legally similar to a blacksmith copying another blacksmith’s designs and putting his trademark mark on their products. IP laws do not inherently restrict anyone from freely practicing their trade nor do they force you to join any trade/industry associations.
      • colejohnson66 5y ago
        > IP laws do not inherently restrict anyone from freely practicing their trade nor do they force you to join any trade/industry associations. While true, it's a gray area when you get into certain industries. Cell phones, for example, are chock-full of cross licensed patents regarding the baseband chips and radio waves. There's a term in the industry for these kinds of patents (my mind is blanking). Ignoring the necessary industry talent, there's no way in hell one can make a new baseband processor without dozens of NDAs and patents that you yourself can offer up as leverage. IMHO (and one many here share), IP laws (with regard to software) have gone way too far. The big problem is that the companies with the might to enact change tend to be part of the problem themselves.
• starfallg 5y ago
  The difference is how the CCP effectively encourage and cover for this type of stealing, for example how the HSR contracts were structured, which was daylight robbery of all of the technologies from the different leaders in the field. Chinese companies are also aggressive in marketing stolen technologies but because of incomplete knowledge and expertise, end up in sub-standard/broken products, such as the capacitor electrolyte issues around 10-15 years ago.
  • oblio 5y ago
    The difference?!? I don't support the CCP, but have you heard of the Opium Wars? Literal drug smuggling wars waged by outside countries? Countries literally forcing drugs down Chinese throats... What they're doing is ugly but it pales in comparison to abuses they've suffered. The only redeeming factor is that those abuses happened a long time ago and China should definitely know better than eye for an eye.
    • GekkePrutser 5y ago
      All countries have done bad things in the past. Mao Zedong killed millions.
      • oblio 5y ago
        He killed his own countrymen (primarily) and this is a discussion about international affairs.
        • dahfizz 5y ago
          You want to pretend like China has a stellar international affairs record? How do you feel about the Chinese treatment of Hong Kong and Taiwan? I don't see how any of this is relevant anyway. What China is doing today with IP is bad. The opium wars have nothing to do with that.
          • oblio 5y ago
• wwtrv 5y ago
  > When Chinese were ahead, European stole and smuggled manufacturing technologies from China. Not disputing this but what technologies did Europeans ever steal from China? I’m only aware of tea and silkworms..
  • retrac 5y ago
    Gunpowder, modern canal building with locks, porcelain? Just off the top of my head. Porcelain is a particularly relevant example; Europeans experimented with it for about a century, intentionally trying to duplicate the Chinese process, finally having success c. 1700 or so with trade secrets being smuggled out by the Jesuits. But these days I think it's the immaterial cultural/cognitive tools that came from China which tend to be underrated. For example, the Chinese invented the concept of the civil service and examinations, as we think of them today. Meritocratic experts admitted based solely on an anonymous written examination (duplicated by scribes so even the handwriting couldn't given the applicant away). This would influence the British East India Company, which ultimately led to it being implemented in Britain: > Even as late as ten years after the competitive examination plan was passed, people still attacked it as an "adopted Chinese culture." Alexander Baillie-Cochrane, 1st Baron Lamington insisted that the English "did not know that it was necessary for them to take lessons from the Celestial Empire."[184] In 1875, Archibald Sayce voiced concern over the prevalence of competitive examinations, which he described as "the invasion of this new Chinese culture." I'm not sure that's patentable, though.
    • onionisafruit 5y ago
      All of those things were taken well after any reasonable patent would have expired, so I don’t think they are comparable to the ip theft currently being discussed in this thread. I thought the upstream comment was talking about more recent examples. Did China try to prevent gunpowder or porcelain from being made by outsiders?
      • oytis 5y ago
        They definitely did try to keep porcelain a secret. As of gunpowder it wasn't stolen by Europeans, rather it seems that it was Mongol invasion that let the knowledge spread.
• walnutclosefarm 5y ago
  > Piracy is not a theft in a sense that it's just illegal, not fundamentally immoral. I think it's actually cool historical constant that moves the world ahead. In as much as the Chinese firms (which in many cases are quasi-state-owned) that do the theft are breaking treaty and contractual commitments, then the piracy is both illegal, and immoral. Not honoring binding commitments is wrong. I have personal experience with this, with, as it happens, Huawei, who licensed code from the European company I worked for, used it far more widely than the license permitted, and then, when we attempted to negotiate a broader license, simply dropped their license entirely, continuing to use the code until they had reverse engineered it and could generate new instantiations on independently of us. (That much I know to be true; I actually suspect, but don't have conclusive evidence, that employees of our Chinese subsidiary who went to work for Huawei stole source code on their way out the door, making most of the reverse engineering a simple hiring decision for Huawei. I also have reasonable evidence that another Chinese firm did the same with a major American technology company I later worked for, although again, it's difficult to prove).
  • vlovich123 5y ago
    By your criterion, what Samuel Slater did was also immoral. Yet I'd argue it was actually for the common good. There's an argument to be made that most IP law itself is immoral as it grants monopoly rights whereas in most other context we recognize monopolies as naturally immoral. In fact, it goes against a very natural inclination to share interesting knowledge and stories. IP law is an attempt to recognize that there's some value in granting limited term immoral monopolistic rights because it net produces a better result longer term. That doesn't mean that IP law itself doesn't open up an immoral land grab and is itself open to abuse. Similarly, we obviously recognize that the commitments themselves may be immoral & thus can be broken (e.g. marriage to an unfaithful spouse) or licenses with immoral clauses should be free to be broken (e.g. you can't sell yourself into bondage). That's not to say that your experience isn't one where the other player was immoral. I'm just trying to broaden the horizon of the discussion beyond your personal story to how we should think about IP more broadly. It's nowhere near as clear cut as you make it and that illusion stems from how the Western legal and education systems work (which is a whole other topic - passing off another's work in education is "plagiarism" whereas if you do it literature it's "ghost writing").
• pokepim 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • wing-_-nuts 5y ago
• mc32 5y ago
  This take ignores the history of the development of intellectual property rights, convention signatories and WTO. Many, many things were unregulated in the past but ARE regulated today. If they wanted to maintain a policy of ignoring IP, etc., they they should not have joined the WTO and signed conventions that hold them to obligations. These organization and conventions set the stage or provide the framework and law by which signatories are bound. Your argument amounts to: hey, the US and Brazil and the Middle East and many other countries used slave workforces in the past therefore it’s okay for China to do the same today, else they are at a developmental disadvantage. In any event, I'm quite sure any patent [had the concept existed] would have run out by the time they were adopted elsewhere.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • ectopod 5y ago
    Keeping slaves is inherently harmful. Copying things is not.
    • mc32 5y ago
      Then they should not have signed on to the WTO and other organizations that bind them to obligations with regards to IP, among other things.
      • lazide 5y ago
        The history of sovereign nations is the history of ‘consequences or not’, as compared to ‘right or wrong’ - for a great many reasons, including that right or wrong is generally a cultural idea that is rarely consistent across cultures, and is often fluid based on trade offs and not as set in stone as we’d all like to believe. If folks were foolish enough to assume a sovereign nation was going to do what they think is right or wrong (including following a treaty when there are obviously no real consequences despite it benefiting them to not follow it), then they weren’t paying attention to history.
    • 5y ago
• neolefty 5y ago
  Great historical perspective. I'm curious how international intellectual "piracy" looks when one thinks of the world as a single place and humanity as a single people.
  • naruvimama 5y ago
    Unless the people have free and unrestricted level playing field, it would not make sense to have the same conditions across the world.
• georgeecollins 5y ago
  >> When Chinese were ahead, European stole and smuggled manufacturing technologies from China. Two wrongs make a right..
• clusterfish 5y ago
  You are correct, but I dislike the offended whataboutism tone. That other countries did the same 100 years ago, or even some other countries still do today, is not the point. The point is it's typical of China to steal IP. It's a problem because it gives Chinese companies an unfair advantage as they grow big by stealing all they want from others, but have their own IP protected in other countries. It would be nice to live in a world without patents, but that's not the world we live in. So if you're ok ignoring reality, might as well go on a tirade how stealing cash is "not immoral" because you don't believe in government issued tender or something.