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This is a very well-written article by someone who is intimately knowledgeable of the history of the field. The interview with Josef Průša is particularly illum

This is a very well-written article by someone who is intimately knowledgeable of the history of the field. The interview with Josef Průša is particularly illuminating. It's a very, very sad story. It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies).

teraflop 3y ago
In case anyone else was curious, the author is Phillip Torrone. (On mobile, the byline is buried in the page footer all the way below the comments, and easy to miss.)
inconceivable 3y ago
china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. if your company is not compatible with china existing, one of these things is going away, and it isn't china. the madder you get, the less they care. they're on the other side of the planet and have their own system. they're not even thinking about you as they go about their business. i swear it's like the collective west just infinite-loops through the stages of grief when it comes to china even existing. and to those of you who think "well we have to do something about it" -- yeah, the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term.
- ChrisKnott 3y ago
  Stealing IP is basically a blue shell. At some point probably China will be leading tech innovation and the West will have little incentive to respect their patents.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - samtho 3y ago
    I just can’t see the PRC and the CCP in its current form sticking around long enough. Between their demographic collapse and pushback on globalization amongst some of the largest nations and economic zones who trade with China (not the mention China imports most of its food), we will see the CCP take an even firmer grasp just before it either collapses or disintegrates. We will likely see the largest cities revert to self-governance and then we will have a better understanding of the geopolitical landscape in which we will all operate in. If Hong Kong‘s economic and political influence positions it to self-govern once again, perhaps taking much of Guangdong with it, we may see more respect for global IP protections.
    - solardev 3y ago
      Is fragmenting into city states more likely than the CCP continuing to change, as it has over the past few decades? Chinese cultural identity, centered around Han dominance and collectivism, has been a unifying force for quite some time. HK was a major exception because of British influence, but I have a hard time seeing the rest of the country willingly breaking up rather than just slowly forcing through change.
    - inconceivable 3y ago
      ground breaking novel analysis: china is going to collapse any day now. for real this time. maybe if we keep repeating it enough, it will happen.
    - dirtyid 3y ago
      PRC global trade increased by 1 trillion with a T in the last 4 years, more than the prior 10 years. That's the greatest expansion in globalism... ever. Most with the global south, some of which is redirected trade to western block who realized they can't decouple but only derisk while the PRC has increased global integration more than... ever. Meanwhile PRC is moving from 25% skilled workforce to 60/70/80% like an advanced economy by spamming ~5M stem per year - for next 20-30 years they'll be reaping the greatest concentrated pool of skilled labour demographic dividend... also ever. Maybe post 2060s demography will be an issue like JP whose problem is they couldn't replace skilled labour at parity and even then they just merely stayed... very competitive. That's what a PRC "collapse" will look like, a massive Japan (as in multiple Japans) where median projection paints 2100 PRC as the second largest country with a skilled workforce many times larger than 2023 PRC. Conveniently, also one that doesn't have to import calories/energy. That's the problem with focusing only on the demographic pyramid and not actual demographic workforce composition. Yes PRC will have demographic challenges, but demographic trends also point toward overwhelming PRC global competitiveness and geopolitical security.
  - solardev 3y ago
    It's not even the same system though. When some Chinese company gets big enough, they just get partially or wholly subsumed by the government in a quasi-nationalization. IP and patents don't have much meaning in such a system. They aren't even much protected from themselves, much less from foreign pirates. They're not quite communist but they don't protect individual property rights to the same degree that we do. If we stole their designs they'd probably just shrug, but we'd still have to contend with our own laws and domestic competitors and international trade agreements with other Western nations, while they just continue on their merry way, growing and growing while securing logistics and supply routes from a bunch of small countries and mines. At the end of the day, their system can more efficiently organize national production around some shared goal. Ours allows more independent experimentation and a faster pace of innovation. But once they have their minds set on something, collectively, I don't think our market would be able to keep pace unless we keep being able to technologically leapfrog them. But that can only last for so long, especially as our education continues to weaken...
    - msla 3y ago
      > At the end of the day, their system can more efficiently organize national production around some shared goal. That sounds like propaganda. Oligopolies are historically hilariously inefficient, and China's brain drain hardly seems like it portends well for them: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-brain-drain-threatens-its-future-dbe38096 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-brain-drain-threatens-it... https://archive.ph/ACMyG https://archive.ph/ACMyG https://web.archive.org/web/20170225132236/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/world/asia/wary-of-future-many-professionals-leave-china.html?pagewanted=all https://web.archive.org/web/20170225132236/http://www.nytime... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-s-millionaire-exodus-as-wealthy-flee-with-america-the-preferred-destination-9069551.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-s-millio...
      - dirtyid 3y ago
        PRC state driven industrial policies are hilariously efficient against entrenched (western) incumbants, because the alternative is to not be competitive at all since new competitors simply can't compete against moat of established western companies with resources that rival government funding, no less US cheap money. PRC scale is large enough to do that, meanwhile most countries/blocs too small or uncoordinated to even try. That's why US/west copying PRC industrial policies, because PRC industrial policy is initially "inefficient", and then they become absurdly efficient, saturating domestic market at first, then export massive surplus to globe, and eats away at western shares. Analysis of PRC moving up value chain and global export share on PV, telecom, android smartphone, display panel shows reduction in operating margin of leading companies by 50-90%. Hence US is trying to stop PRC semi. And I'm guessing west on PRC EV soon. Because the efficiency of PRC indy policy is also measured in making western companies less productive. As for PRC brain drain, Chinese academics/talent in west floating back to PRC in record numbers. Those are good portends vs statistically insignificant % of millionaires trying to hide their money abroad. Which entire ignores the fact that PRC generates so much domestic talent now that west can't meaningfuly braindrain even if they wanted to. PRC is in process of milking the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history. It took PRC 20 years to build up ~15M STEM talent to catch up in west in most sectors except extremely difficult integration projects like aviation and semi. She's generating that much talent every 3-4 years now. E: over post limit Yet the west copies PRC, an "unserious" regime, none the less. From PRC content moderation, to surveillance, to industrial policies, there's more convergence than divergence. Because PRC is prescient. Enough so to be labelled as only US competitor who is capable of reshaping global order.
  - dirtyid 3y ago
    Which is IMO fine for PRC since it's manufacturing base can always out compete west on cost. The real issue is IP law protects incumbents, predominantly western companies. Stats from a few years ago was PRC was paying $6 in IP to US for every $1 it took. It's a rigged game with rules made by west to benefit west. It's unsustainable. As PRC catches up, would it like a world where their IP gets respected? Yes, but the second best is a world where western IP gets increasingly ignored because that deals disproportionate damage to those with most profitable IP portfolios.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - balloonthief 3y ago
    It's a tale as old as trade itself, and the US was just as guilty in its infancy: https://theworld.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-nations-are-stealing-us-technology-america-has-history https://theworld.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-n...
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Prusa's comments here are very important. In this specific case, China is not "stealing intellectual property" in the sense that they are using it without a license; they are literally stealing title to the inventions in question, which is way worse. Of course, the obvious solution would be to not respect international patent priority from China, but that is tantamount to fighting a trade war, which has significant strategic implications. You can't sue the US to force them to de-normalize trade relations with China for the same reason why you can't sue the US to force the army to nuke China.
  - doublespanner 3y ago
    It's not easy to go from catching up to leading... Maybe China can but it seems far more likely that they are destined to settle in a few miles behind the west like the rest of the Asian tigers.
- daniel_reetz 3y ago
  Also, this is OSHW - Open Source Hardware - a _copyright_ based license, U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. Patents are a whole other subject. This article is about Open Hardware being abused, not patents. I stopped working on OSHW because it can't protect hardware. It has no legal teeth. Better to just give it away (public domain or whatever).
  - blackguardx 3y ago
    Hardware can be copyrighted, but it only protects the PCB layout.
  - kayfox 3y ago
    > U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. It does, it specifically protects chip die masks and by implication and case law protects PCB layouts and circuit diagrams.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. China can do whatever the f..k they want. The problem is our own governments: they could and should have sanctioned the country to oblivion... had they not foolishly tied their entire nations to the success of China. We all allowed, hell we welcomed Chinese products in our markets because our population got a decade or two of cheap Chinese made crap products which helped to hide wage stagnation (and rich CEOs getting ever richer). Then we got addicted, a ton of jobs got shipped off to China, here in Germany they stripped an entire mining facility and sent it overseas [1], and far-right parties fed themselves fat on the resulting economic devastation. And then we went even more foolish and sat idly by as our car companies completely ignored the domestic market and only focused on growing in China... with the predictable fuck-up that China learned how to make cheap EVs and now our industry is at the curb of collapsing against cheap Chinese cars and no competent competition bar Tesla. [1] https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach-china.html https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach...
  - leidenfrost 3y ago
    The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. 20 years ago it "could" be justified by selling the idea that American or European labor is light years away in terms of quality compared to Chinese or any developing country's labor. And that may still be true, but the gap has shrunk in size by a lot. To the point that corporations may not want to pay 120k or 200k a year for something that can be made in a developing country for 20k a year and with ~80% of the quality.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. The thing is, the comparatively high labor cost in Western countries is so high because we can actually have a life on it and feed a bunch of uber rich people with our labor and taxes (because guess what, people like Warren Buffett and his ilk pay a ridiculously low tax rate [1] compared to legitimately employed working class people). In contrast, China, India, Thailand or Vietnam can offer very cheap labor because for the people there even utter pittances and absolutely ridiculous exploitation are better than the life these people had before. While I do support the efforts China and India both have committed to lifting literally a billion of people out of utter poverty, it has at the same time brought disastrous consequences on our own society. I'd be happier with globalization if we had forced importers of any good to make sure that wages, labor conditions and environmental impact were on par with domestic regulations because the status quo is exploitation on all levels to benefit Western oligarchs (and imagine how the life of Chinese factory workers would be with Western wages!). [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg-icahn-and-soros-pay-little-in-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg...
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  In other words, intellectual property does not work. That era ended a while ago, and the west is still playing pretend.
  - disintegore 3y ago
    It was always a farce to begin with. Inventing scarcity where there is none because there was zero willingness to organize production around anything other than markets. It was a bad but understandably necessary move back when the printing press was invented. Centuries later, with practically instant and practically infinite reproduction of most types of information, it's pure insanity.
    - thomastjeffery 3y ago
      It was workable when there was a real cost associated with reproduction. Everyone knew it was arbitrary social scaffolding, but it was stable enough for society to keep it standing. Now that scaffold has no real foundation, save for a handful of gigantic corporations holding on as tightly as they can, and punishing anyone who dares contradict them.
  - yarg 3y ago
    It can't work if you're willing to engage with bad faith players, and are unwilling to call them out for their bullshit. China has been depending on industrial espionage in order to keep up for decades now. Punish them for their malfeasance. The way that the west works is far from ideal, but limited term intellectual property protection provides a significant portion of the motivation for the creation of novel products. Without those protections, and the products that depend on them, there won't even be designs for China to steal. Of course, there is a very valid argument that we don't actually need a lot of that shit, regardless of who's making it.
    - thomastjeffery 3y ago
      > call them out Oh, that's been done plenty. They don't care. Now what...escalate? That's been done, too. Hell, that was probably Trump's biggest campaign promise. Obviously it didn't work. So how far should we keep escalating? Do we declare war over intellectual property? Fuck that. It's time to wake up. We are the ones being called out on our bullshit. China called our bluff, and we are left holding the cards. There is no sense in waiting around: we should fold ASAP.
- oytis 3y ago
  > the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term. Come on, China was pretty irrelevant to the outside world until the US started pumping money into it in the 70s. That's exactly what the West should stop doing.
  - inconceivable 3y ago
    the reason you are so confused is because your assumption that china just popped into existence fully-formed in 1945 or whatever, is totally and utterly wrong and ignores literally hundreds if not thousands of years of relevant history. literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on.
    - cracrecry 3y ago
      >literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on. China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. To portray Chinese like saints or victims is not knowing about the thousands of years you talk about.
      - cyberax 3y ago
        > China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. Uhm... You clearly have no idea about China. First, it was _itself_ conquered by Mongols ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China ). Who were then simply assimilated. Second, China has never conquered Japan. Overall, China has been remarkably non-aggressive.
        disintegore 3y ago
josephcsible 3y ago
> China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). I wish Western countries had import bans on goods manufactured by Chinese companies that did that.
- impalallama 3y ago
  It’s happened but only on highly strategically important stuff like microprocessors
eropple 3y ago
So...the thing is, the real competitors to the Prusa i3 printers are open-source. Like, actually. The Sovol SV06 is a Chinese printer very clearly based on the Prusa i3 heritage. It's an excellent alternative to the MK3S+ and the firmware source and CAD designs are on GitHub. There are definitely budget-range 3D printers with an i3 heritage (probably not derived tightly from the Prusa design, a lot of them seem like the product of one engineer and a disassembled Ender 3), but the SV06 is for my money the one to get, and it's a quarter of the price of an MK3S+, without the bizarre-in-2023 "preassembled" option that's table stakes for everybody else. The bigger problem seems to be that the i3 printers are table stakes now, while Prusa engine seized up and forward progress went to pot. The Prusa XL is not vaporware but it's close and preposterously expensive, while the MK4 released without input shaping in their extremely customized port of Marlin. Those "Chinese knockoffs" are shipping Klipper-based printers, with SBCs, where you get that for free. And then you have the Bambu printers, which are OSS-compliant where required (their slicer is a derivative of PrusaSlicer) but built an in-house OS (not actually that shocking, and almost certainly not pirated; 3D printers just aren't that hard) that has given them a printer that's conservatively 18-24 months ahead of everybody except maybe Prusa with the XL. I really don't like Bambu's patent saber-rattling, that sucks, but they just shipped a better mousetrap, too. Open-source 3D printing is on the ropes because it isn't making stuff as good as the closed-source stuff. Not because of cheap cloners. I didn't want to buy a Bambu printer so held out for the Creality K1 (and they are being bad citizens, they haven't released their Klipper source) and it's not good, I waited for Prusa to sell me on a Prusa XL but to get one I'll be waiting until 2024 at the earliest and spending $500 on that "preassembled" option to boot, and...Bambu just sold me a P1S with an AMS for $1000 flat. C'mon.
- wasted_intel 3y ago
  > which are OSS-compliant where required This is the crux of the problem. Where Prusa is openly sharing, you have companies that are benefiting from that without reciprocating. Part of the tax you're paying when buying an i3MK4 is the continued investment in the open source/hardware contributions of the company, not just the end product. Shelling out $1k for a Bambu is your prerogative, but it does cast a vote with your wallet for a company that is more predatory than collaborative.
tmchu 3y ago
>It's a very, very sad story. It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). Why is this China factor even a problem for open-source? The open source community have always been threaten by closed-source copycat. Even western companies also do that without much repercussion. The real threat is, as the article pointed out, the trend of `open source` companies going closed source because of profit motive.
- nyolfen 3y ago
  prusa describes the issue as being that chinese enterprises file for bogus patents in china at scale based on open source work, and due to trade agreements the patents can be extended to other countries. even if the patents are bogus they could still file suit to crush western competitors at home by wasting resources, and they have state backing/funding
  - tmchu 3y ago
    Again, litigation and patent trolls are nothing new to the community. Claiming China in this case sounds like a crutch to wash off their own image after doing fishy thing themselves.
  - eropple 3y ago
    Prusa's primary opponent in this space would be Bambu--who, to be clear, are rattling their saber about patents, and they suck for that. They also have a better, faster printer that has its full feature set available on release, and Prusa does not. I am more annoyed that Prusa is doing a bad job of shepherding open source and shipping bad products than that Bambu has a closed-source better one.
    - chaxor 3y ago
      This is very close to the academia/industry divide. Academia (the public) spends an enormous amount of money investing in research to discover something novel and effective, or makes a large efficiency gain. Industry reads that, and implements it, with some minor tweaks. This, products are made for fractions of the cost it would have otherwise cost to make, with large improvements over previous capabilities, due to the work done in the public sphere. Effectively very similar to open and closed source.
gchadwick 3y ago
Are the Chinese companies actually persuing IP claims? What it says about patents is concerning but there's no concrete example of practical issues from it so far. If a Chinese company simply makes and sells a version of an open source design are they doing anything wrong? This is allowed by the licensing terms.
- nyolfen 3y ago
  per prusa's comments in the article, they are filing patents based on open source work at scale
  - eropple 3y ago
    Patents, yes. Deployed patents, not to date. I have only marginal sympathy for Prusa when they aren't shipping things people want to buy.
- Fomite 3y ago
  Bambu has been saber rattling. Ironically, I think it's less aimed at Prusa and more at their own Chinese knock-off competitors.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). The problem is rather the customers who buy China stuff instead of products from companies from western countries.
disintegore 3y ago
There's something I'm just not getting with Prusa's justification. With open hardware, anyone can take your designs and run with them. Not just Chinese companies with zero regard for IP law. There is no IP to have regard for. Mercantilist policies in China should affect all western companies in that market more or less the same. I am not seeing how relicensing will make Prusa3D's business more viable.
- karurosu 3y ago
  The problem is not stealing the design, the problem is stealing the design, getting a patent based on it then suing you. Even if its obviously a bogus patent the cost and time required to fight it off can kill your company.
blitzar 3y ago
https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88dc53 https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88... "The upstart nation was a den of intellectual piracy. One of its top officials urged his countrymen to steal and copy foreign machinery. Across the ocean, a leading industrial power tried in vain to guard its trade secrets from the brash young rival. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rogue nation was the United States."

teraflop 3y ago

In case anyone else was curious, the author is Phillip Torrone. (On mobile, the byline is buried in the page footer all the way below the comments, and easy to miss.)

inconceivable 3y ago

china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. if your company is not compatible with china existing, one of these things is going away, and it isn't china. the madder you get, the less they care. they're on the other side of the planet and have their own system. they're not even thinking about you as they go about their business. i swear it's like the collective west just infinite-loops through the stages of grief when it comes to china even existing. and to those of you who think "well we have to do something about it" -- yeah, the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term.

ChrisKnott 3y ago
Stealing IP is basically a blue shell. At some point probably China will be leading tech innovation and the West will have little incentive to respect their patents.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- samtho 3y ago
  I just can’t see the PRC and the CCP in its current form sticking around long enough. Between their demographic collapse and pushback on globalization amongst some of the largest nations and economic zones who trade with China (not the mention China imports most of its food), we will see the CCP take an even firmer grasp just before it either collapses or disintegrates. We will likely see the largest cities revert to self-governance and then we will have a better understanding of the geopolitical landscape in which we will all operate in. If Hong Kong‘s economic and political influence positions it to self-govern once again, perhaps taking much of Guangdong with it, we may see more respect for global IP protections.
  - solardev 3y ago
    Is fragmenting into city states more likely than the CCP continuing to change, as it has over the past few decades? Chinese cultural identity, centered around Han dominance and collectivism, has been a unifying force for quite some time. HK was a major exception because of British influence, but I have a hard time seeing the rest of the country willingly breaking up rather than just slowly forcing through change.
  - inconceivable 3y ago
    ground breaking novel analysis: china is going to collapse any day now. for real this time. maybe if we keep repeating it enough, it will happen.
  - dirtyid 3y ago
    PRC global trade increased by 1 trillion with a T in the last 4 years, more than the prior 10 years. That's the greatest expansion in globalism... ever. Most with the global south, some of which is redirected trade to western block who realized they can't decouple but only derisk while the PRC has increased global integration more than... ever. Meanwhile PRC is moving from 25% skilled workforce to 60/70/80% like an advanced economy by spamming ~5M stem per year - for next 20-30 years they'll be reaping the greatest concentrated pool of skilled labour demographic dividend... also ever. Maybe post 2060s demography will be an issue like JP whose problem is they couldn't replace skilled labour at parity and even then they just merely stayed... very competitive. That's what a PRC "collapse" will look like, a massive Japan (as in multiple Japans) where median projection paints 2100 PRC as the second largest country with a skilled workforce many times larger than 2023 PRC. Conveniently, also one that doesn't have to import calories/energy. That's the problem with focusing only on the demographic pyramid and not actual demographic workforce composition. Yes PRC will have demographic challenges, but demographic trends also point toward overwhelming PRC global competitiveness and geopolitical security.
- solardev 3y ago
  It's not even the same system though. When some Chinese company gets big enough, they just get partially or wholly subsumed by the government in a quasi-nationalization. IP and patents don't have much meaning in such a system. They aren't even much protected from themselves, much less from foreign pirates. They're not quite communist but they don't protect individual property rights to the same degree that we do. If we stole their designs they'd probably just shrug, but we'd still have to contend with our own laws and domestic competitors and international trade agreements with other Western nations, while they just continue on their merry way, growing and growing while securing logistics and supply routes from a bunch of small countries and mines. At the end of the day, their system can more efficiently organize national production around some shared goal. Ours allows more independent experimentation and a faster pace of innovation. But once they have their minds set on something, collectively, I don't think our market would be able to keep pace unless we keep being able to technologically leapfrog them. But that can only last for so long, especially as our education continues to weaken...
  - msla 3y ago
    > At the end of the day, their system can more efficiently organize national production around some shared goal. That sounds like propaganda. Oligopolies are historically hilariously inefficient, and China's brain drain hardly seems like it portends well for them: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-brain-drain-threatens-its-future-dbe38096 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-brain-drain-threatens-it... https://archive.ph/ACMyG https://archive.ph/ACMyG https://web.archive.org/web/20170225132236/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/world/asia/wary-of-future-many-professionals-leave-china.html?pagewanted=all https://web.archive.org/web/20170225132236/http://www.nytime... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-s-millionaire-exodus-as-wealthy-flee-with-america-the-preferred-destination-9069551.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-s-millio...
    - dirtyid 3y ago
      PRC state driven industrial policies are hilariously efficient against entrenched (western) incumbants, because the alternative is to not be competitive at all since new competitors simply can't compete against moat of established western companies with resources that rival government funding, no less US cheap money. PRC scale is large enough to do that, meanwhile most countries/blocs too small or uncoordinated to even try. That's why US/west copying PRC industrial policies, because PRC industrial policy is initially "inefficient", and then they become absurdly efficient, saturating domestic market at first, then export massive surplus to globe, and eats away at western shares. Analysis of PRC moving up value chain and global export share on PV, telecom, android smartphone, display panel shows reduction in operating margin of leading companies by 50-90%. Hence US is trying to stop PRC semi. And I'm guessing west on PRC EV soon. Because the efficiency of PRC indy policy is also measured in making western companies less productive. As for PRC brain drain, Chinese academics/talent in west floating back to PRC in record numbers. Those are good portends vs statistically insignificant % of millionaires trying to hide their money abroad. Which entire ignores the fact that PRC generates so much domestic talent now that west can't meaningfuly braindrain even if they wanted to. PRC is in process of milking the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history. It took PRC 20 years to build up ~15M STEM talent to catch up in west in most sectors except extremely difficult integration projects like aviation and semi. She's generating that much talent every 3-4 years now. E: over post limit Yet the west copies PRC, an "unserious" regime, none the less. From PRC content moderation, to surveillance, to industrial policies, there's more convergence than divergence. Because PRC is prescient. Enough so to be labelled as only US competitor who is capable of reshaping global order.
- dirtyid 3y ago
  Which is IMO fine for PRC since it's manufacturing base can always out compete west on cost. The real issue is IP law protects incumbents, predominantly western companies. Stats from a few years ago was PRC was paying $6 in IP to US for every $1 it took. It's a rigged game with rules made by west to benefit west. It's unsustainable. As PRC catches up, would it like a world where their IP gets respected? Yes, but the second best is a world where western IP gets increasingly ignored because that deals disproportionate damage to those with most profitable IP portfolios.
  - deleted 3y ago
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- balloonthief 3y ago
  It's a tale as old as trade itself, and the US was just as guilty in its infancy: https://theworld.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-nations-are-stealing-us-technology-america-has-history https://theworld.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-n...
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Prusa's comments here are very important. In this specific case, China is not "stealing intellectual property" in the sense that they are using it without a license; they are literally stealing title to the inventions in question, which is way worse. Of course, the obvious solution would be to not respect international patent priority from China, but that is tantamount to fighting a trade war, which has significant strategic implications. You can't sue the US to force them to de-normalize trade relations with China for the same reason why you can't sue the US to force the army to nuke China.
- doublespanner 3y ago
  It's not easy to go from catching up to leading... Maybe China can but it seems far more likely that they are destined to settle in a few miles behind the west like the rest of the Asian tigers.
daniel_reetz 3y ago
Also, this is OSHW - Open Source Hardware - a _copyright_ based license, U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. Patents are a whole other subject. This article is about Open Hardware being abused, not patents. I stopped working on OSHW because it can't protect hardware. It has no legal teeth. Better to just give it away (public domain or whatever).
- blackguardx 3y ago
  Hardware can be copyrighted, but it only protects the PCB layout.
- kayfox 3y ago
  > U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. It does, it specifically protects chip die masks and by implication and case law protects PCB layouts and circuit diagrams.
mschuster91 3y ago
> china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. China can do whatever the f..k they want. The problem is our own governments: they could and should have sanctioned the country to oblivion... had they not foolishly tied their entire nations to the success of China. We all allowed, hell we welcomed Chinese products in our markets because our population got a decade or two of cheap Chinese made crap products which helped to hide wage stagnation (and rich CEOs getting ever richer). Then we got addicted, a ton of jobs got shipped off to China, here in Germany they stripped an entire mining facility and sent it overseas [1], and far-right parties fed themselves fat on the resulting economic devastation. And then we went even more foolish and sat idly by as our car companies completely ignored the domestic market and only focused on growing in China... with the predictable fuck-up that China learned how to make cheap EVs and now our industry is at the curb of collapsing against cheap Chinese cars and no competent competition bar Tesla. [1] https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach-china.html https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach...
- leidenfrost 3y ago
  The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. 20 years ago it "could" be justified by selling the idea that American or European labor is light years away in terms of quality compared to Chinese or any developing country's labor. And that may still be true, but the gap has shrunk in size by a lot. To the point that corporations may not want to pay 120k or 200k a year for something that can be made in a developing country for 20k a year and with ~80% of the quality.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. The thing is, the comparatively high labor cost in Western countries is so high because we can actually have a life on it and feed a bunch of uber rich people with our labor and taxes (because guess what, people like Warren Buffett and his ilk pay a ridiculously low tax rate [1] compared to legitimately employed working class people). In contrast, China, India, Thailand or Vietnam can offer very cheap labor because for the people there even utter pittances and absolutely ridiculous exploitation are better than the life these people had before. While I do support the efforts China and India both have committed to lifting literally a billion of people out of utter poverty, it has at the same time brought disastrous consequences on our own society. I'd be happier with globalization if we had forced importers of any good to make sure that wages, labor conditions and environmental impact were on par with domestic regulations because the status quo is exploitation on all levels to benefit Western oligarchs (and imagine how the life of Chinese factory workers would be with Western wages!). [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg-icahn-and-soros-pay-little-in-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg...
thomastjeffery 3y ago
In other words, intellectual property does not work. That era ended a while ago, and the west is still playing pretend.
- disintegore 3y ago
  It was always a farce to begin with. Inventing scarcity where there is none because there was zero willingness to organize production around anything other than markets. It was a bad but understandably necessary move back when the printing press was invented. Centuries later, with practically instant and practically infinite reproduction of most types of information, it's pure insanity.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    It was workable when there was a real cost associated with reproduction. Everyone knew it was arbitrary social scaffolding, but it was stable enough for society to keep it standing. Now that scaffold has no real foundation, save for a handful of gigantic corporations holding on as tightly as they can, and punishing anyone who dares contradict them.
- yarg 3y ago
  It can't work if you're willing to engage with bad faith players, and are unwilling to call them out for their bullshit. China has been depending on industrial espionage in order to keep up for decades now. Punish them for their malfeasance. The way that the west works is far from ideal, but limited term intellectual property protection provides a significant portion of the motivation for the creation of novel products. Without those protections, and the products that depend on them, there won't even be designs for China to steal. Of course, there is a very valid argument that we don't actually need a lot of that shit, regardless of who's making it.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    > call them out Oh, that's been done plenty. They don't care. Now what...escalate? That's been done, too. Hell, that was probably Trump's biggest campaign promise. Obviously it didn't work. So how far should we keep escalating? Do we declare war over intellectual property? Fuck that. It's time to wake up. We are the ones being called out on our bullshit. China called our bluff, and we are left holding the cards. There is no sense in waiting around: we should fold ASAP.
oytis 3y ago
> the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term. Come on, China was pretty irrelevant to the outside world until the US started pumping money into it in the 70s. That's exactly what the West should stop doing.
- inconceivable 3y ago
  the reason you are so confused is because your assumption that china just popped into existence fully-formed in 1945 or whatever, is totally and utterly wrong and ignores literally hundreds if not thousands of years of relevant history. literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on.
  - cracrecry 3y ago
    >literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on. China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. To portray Chinese like saints or victims is not knowing about the thousands of years you talk about.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      > China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. Uhm... You clearly have no idea about China. First, it was _itself_ conquered by Mongols ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China ). Who were then simply assimilated. Second, China has never conquered Japan. Overall, China has been remarkably non-aggressive.
      - disintegore 3y ago

josephcsible 3y ago

> China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). I wish Western countries had import bans on goods manufactured by Chinese companies that did that.

impalallama 3y ago
It’s happened but only on highly strategically important stuff like microprocessors

eropple 3y ago

So...the thing is, the real competitors to the Prusa i3 printers are open-source. Like, actually. The Sovol SV06 is a Chinese printer very clearly based on the Prusa i3 heritage. It's an excellent alternative to the MK3S+ and the firmware source and CAD designs are on GitHub. There are definitely budget-range 3D printers with an i3 heritage (probably not derived tightly from the Prusa design, a lot of them seem like the product of one engineer and a disassembled Ender 3), but the SV06 is for my money the one to get, and it's a quarter of the price of an MK3S+, without the bizarre-in-2023 "preassembled" option that's table stakes for everybody else. The bigger problem seems to be that the i3 printers are table stakes now, while Prusa engine seized up and forward progress went to pot. The Prusa XL is not vaporware but it's close and preposterously expensive, while the MK4 released without input shaping in their extremely customized port of Marlin. Those "Chinese knockoffs" are shipping Klipper-based printers, with SBCs, where you get that for free. And then you have the Bambu printers, which are OSS-compliant where required (their slicer is a derivative of PrusaSlicer) but built an in-house OS (not actually that shocking, and almost certainly not pirated; 3D printers just aren't that hard) that has given them a printer that's conservatively 18-24 months ahead of everybody except maybe Prusa with the XL. I really don't like Bambu's patent saber-rattling, that sucks, but they just shipped a better mousetrap, too. Open-source 3D printing is on the ropes because it isn't making stuff as good as the closed-source stuff. Not because of cheap cloners. I didn't want to buy a Bambu printer so held out for the Creality K1 (and they are being bad citizens, they haven't released their Klipper source) and it's not good, I waited for Prusa to sell me on a Prusa XL but to get one I'll be waiting until 2024 at the earliest and spending $500 on that "preassembled" option to boot, and...Bambu just sold me a P1S with an AMS for $1000 flat. C'mon.

wasted_intel 3y ago
> which are OSS-compliant where required This is the crux of the problem. Where Prusa is openly sharing, you have companies that are benefiting from that without reciprocating. Part of the tax you're paying when buying an i3MK4 is the continued investment in the open source/hardware contributions of the company, not just the end product. Shelling out $1k for a Bambu is your prerogative, but it does cast a vote with your wallet for a company that is more predatory than collaborative.

tmchu 3y ago

>It's a very, very sad story. It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). Why is this China factor even a problem for open-source? The open source community have always been threaten by closed-source copycat. Even western companies also do that without much repercussion. The real threat is, as the article pointed out, the trend of `open source` companies going closed source because of profit motive.

nyolfen 3y ago
prusa describes the issue as being that chinese enterprises file for bogus patents in china at scale based on open source work, and due to trade agreements the patents can be extended to other countries. even if the patents are bogus they could still file suit to crush western competitors at home by wasting resources, and they have state backing/funding
- tmchu 3y ago
  Again, litigation and patent trolls are nothing new to the community. Claiming China in this case sounds like a crutch to wash off their own image after doing fishy thing themselves.
- eropple 3y ago
  Prusa's primary opponent in this space would be Bambu--who, to be clear, are rattling their saber about patents, and they suck for that. They also have a better, faster printer that has its full feature set available on release, and Prusa does not. I am more annoyed that Prusa is doing a bad job of shepherding open source and shipping bad products than that Bambu has a closed-source better one.
  - chaxor 3y ago
    This is very close to the academia/industry divide. Academia (the public) spends an enormous amount of money investing in research to discover something novel and effective, or makes a large efficiency gain. Industry reads that, and implements it, with some minor tweaks. This, products are made for fractions of the cost it would have otherwise cost to make, with large improvements over previous capabilities, due to the work done in the public sphere. Effectively very similar to open and closed source.

gchadwick 3y ago

Are the Chinese companies actually persuing IP claims? What it says about patents is concerning but there's no concrete example of practical issues from it so far. If a Chinese company simply makes and sells a version of an open source design are they doing anything wrong? This is allowed by the licensing terms.

nyolfen 3y ago
per prusa's comments in the article, they are filing patents based on open source work at scale
- eropple 3y ago
  Patents, yes. Deployed patents, not to date. I have only marginal sympathy for Prusa when they aren't shipping things people want to buy.
Fomite 3y ago
Bambu has been saber rattling. Ironically, I think it's less aimed at Prusa and more at their own Chinese knock-off competitors.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

> It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). The problem is rather the customers who buy China stuff instead of products from companies from western countries.

disintegore 3y ago

There's something I'm just not getting with Prusa's justification. With open hardware, anyone can take your designs and run with them. Not just Chinese companies with zero regard for IP law. There is no IP to have regard for. Mercantilist policies in China should affect all western companies in that market more or less the same. I am not seeing how relicensing will make Prusa3D's business more viable.

karurosu 3y ago
The problem is not stealing the design, the problem is stealing the design, getting a patent based on it then suing you. Even if its obviously a bogus patent the cost and time required to fight it off can kill your company.

blitzar 3y ago

https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88dc53 https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88... "The upstart nation was a den of intellectual piracy. One of its top officials urged his countrymen to steal and copy foreign machinery. Across the ocean, a leading industrial power tried in vain to guard its trade secrets from the brash young rival. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rogue nation was the United States."