China's strategy has always been the same - wait for others to bleed in their blood and money on R&D and when the technology is ripe and well working, simply rip it off effortlessly and sell it a lower price point, most of the times not even caring about quality/safety compromises.
We saw this with the Japanese bullet trains, we saw this with self driving tech, and now it's display tech.
You could argue that the consumers benefit the most over time. But it's definitely unfair to those who have dedicated their lives to researching these technologies, only to see it get stolen and even re-licensed as China's own (as what happened with the bullet trains).
The rest of the world should stop playing by Chinese's rules and be firm in their stance like the US - Eg. if China doesn't enforce strict IP rules, then people should seek alternatives and stop dealing with them. Even India/Vietnam/Malaysia/etc. are better bets in comparison. Especially when these schemes are sponsored by the Chinese government 9 times out of 10.
Wasn’t that Japan’s strategy in the 70s and South Korea’s in the 90s?
And I’m pretty sure that was the US strategy during the Industrial Revolution. Or the European strategy when it came to stealing Chinese silk making methods.
Whataboutism. As always, two Wrongs don’t make a Right, and OP is not even talking about the morality of it (everyone agrees it is immoral) but about countermeasures.
Theft is immoral. I can't just sneak into your home, steal your stuff and walk away saying you're holding mankind back, can I? That's the analogy in the OP.
Samsung's $130 million investment over years, sold out to Chinese firms for $14 million.
To the Chinese, theft of IP is just business as usual.
Every single firm I've personally encountered that has done biz in China has either already had their IP stolen and sold in competition with it (or just products sold out the back door w/o label), or fully expects that it would happen and takes strong defensive strategies, e.g., sending pre-mixed materials to China where they only do the final process.
This is not sustainable. While the West thinks that we were exploiting China for it's cheap labor, the Chinese had a much longer range view -- they were exploiting our myopic lust for short-term profits to get our most valuable assets and gain long-term strategic advantage, both in both commercial and military technology.
This is likely to go down as one of history's greatest strategic blunders.
I wonder if it has already gone too far for us to recover.
China has been playing the "international trade" game for longer than most western cultures have existed. To ever think that the US/etc were taking advantage of them, was naive at best.
Who seriously thought the US was taking advantage of China?
The WTO riots in Seattle were partly because this was an obviously dumb strategy that sold out the well-being of the public for the enrichment of a few elites.
Given the markets in the 17 and 18th centuries weren't as vibrant and open as today, and the amount of technology stolen by the Chinese today, compared to the amount "stolen" by Europeans back then, this comparison is plain disingenuous.
Edit: expanding: the technology wasn't stolen in the same sense as today, because the Chinese couldn't not wanted to export and sell the technology back to the West. But US/Europe today are getting their IP stolen, and immediately sold to them. That's the asymmetry.
Oh certainly, the scale is significantly different. I think that the rei-ification of IPR just isn't understood the same way culturally, the "crime" is not taken in the same sense the effect on Chinese economy and polity is taken. Much the same as the Russians for much of the 20th century: must catch up is like a joker card mentality. Except of course as long as you steal IPR, you can't catch up in real sense.
That's right. The long-term trend will be in the direction of China playing by club rules. When China is a fully developed nation, its brands are valuable overseas and its own technology is superior in many markets. Then it'll be in China's interest to enforce global trading rules.
Things move faster(fortunately) but the effect is similar. Any small invention in the past had huge effects on history. Europens won over the indigenious people because of the technology. It was not very advanced but good enough to change history. If the chinesse were not so...communist I wouldn't really say it's a bad thing in the big picture.
Do you see a difference between one person learning a process inside and out, and reproducing it elsewhere, versus the work product of thousands of engineers being stolen, far more information than a single human could ever possibly know? The former is like watching a chef work and seeing how he cooks a beef Wellington and doing it yourself, whereas the latter is like just taking his whole recipe set.
I think you're misunderstanding the pre-industrial-revolution world's attitude to trade secrets. "Learning a process inside and out, and reproducing it elsewhere" was not allowed, at least for high-value processes.
And I also suspect you're not understanding the relative value of those processes (glass, tea, porcelain, etc) to the economy of those areas vs the current relative value of the "product of thousands of engineers".
Don't forget silk. For 3,000 years it was a complete mystery to China's trading partners. Even that it came from lavae was not known by most. Korea was the first to appropriate Chinese sericulture technology.
Sure, cutting-edge intellectual property these days is more complicated and unlikely to be completely and fully understood by a single person. That's a function of the progress of technology.
I don't see how one person, or one country, stealing IP via memorization (the technology of the 1800s) is meaningfully different from someone stealing IP on a USB stick (the technology of today).
When people decide to send ideas to be turned into things in China, what's being removed is labour value: it's too expensive to make something in the USA, compared to China.
The cost of labour and compliance with health and safety is the main factor.
Is it surprising the Chinese industrialist looks at the rate of profit for these goods sold in the USA and tries to copy them, and secure some of that gap between cost (of production) and price?
So now, thinking like a US consumer, which is better? The iPhone sold by Steve jobs, or the cheaper phone with stolen IPR? What if the stolen IPR is totally ephemeral and only about the GUI?
Consider that their govt calendar is primarily organized around 5-year plans, that they apparently have 100-year plans (and possibly even longer), and have many long-term plans such as the 'belt and road initiative'.
Even if they didn't originally conceive of it as a plan before Nixon/Kissinger's 'opening' (i.e., the original opportunity sort of fell into their lap), we can be quite sure that once they recognized the opportunity, they have made very careful long term plans to exploit it.
We can also observe that these plans are being diligently executed now.
That shit was stolen from Xerox circa 2004. They had working flexible monitor prototypes back then. I worked as a phone rep for a little Xerox agency while I was in college. I setup their first AdWords campaign because I hated cold calling for selling toner refills and copier upgrade so very much. Xerox corporate marketing site was advertising flexible monitors on their homepage - a page I must have viewed 1200+ times. I can't find that URL on the wayback machine, but I did find a contemporaneous article: https://books.google.com/books?id=1VRuoq7h2FcC&lpg=PA503&ots...
Or maybe the screens would have retailed for something like $5000 each, in a market with little to no demand (eg: consumer video conferencing prior to smartphones).
What is interesting is that it is the edge molding technology that has been reported stolen... which means it's either really difficult or a side show to all the other challenging parts of a foldable phone. I don't doubt that there is a lot of mechanical engineering difficulty in getting a design like this to MP and that one long difficult to manufacture pole could make it or break it as a product.
This is a bad report as the reporter doesn't even bother finding out who the accused are. See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-samsung-elec/south-... The accused seller of technology is not some no name entity. Toptec is a publicly traded equipment maker, which incidentally is South Korean, not Chinese.
The article claims the buyers are Chinese. The seller is who is being sued though. I suppose buying stolen goods is also illegal but yeah... it is odd they focus on the nationality of the buyers.
It's not odd at all - once you understand the goal is to smear Chinese again.
Look at comments even in this topic - there's already ranting against China here. Not even HNers cared enough to read about who stole what. The propaganda objective has been reached.
> It's not odd at all - once you understand the goal is to smear Chinese again.
Instead of viewing it as such, why not try to understand the core of the problem - that the Chinese don't respect IP laws. There is no (proper) framework to even sue a Chinese company should IP theft occur, let alone get legal support from the government if you're a foreign company fighting against the Chinese. The government will always side with the local companies.
The tech was stolen by a Korean company and sold to a Chinese company. China is famous for stealing Western tech. The "IP is evil" crowd on HN think this is utopia. The rest (like me) think it's terrible. But the fact that Chinese tech companies routinely steal tech is not in question, and it's not even objectively a smear.
I think copyright and IP in general is important and both extremes are bad. Sadly this is one area where there are seemingly no easy solutions.
Fashion seems to cope well without IP protection except trademarks.
And arguably a lot of human endeavors could be done less adversarially (such as pharma research, battery research, etc) but the lure of potential future profit drives a lot of R&D there.
So maybe the solution is to reserve IP for things that seem to work well only in a market race setup, but drop it to a few years in all other areas. And as we set up X prizes, a regulator/committee could designate specialized R&D races. (Or other kinds of IP incentives.)
Though who knows. Would Netflix produce new series/content without the 70 years of copyright? Well maybe not, but probably there wouldn't be a Netflix either if all that content were just p2p available from the Library after 4-5 years.
Royale is an interesting company, but I wouldn't call that a phone form-factor. It's also not clear to me that product is available for delivery today in Royale stores in China.
If China continues down this path to stealing everyone's tech, it's in the interest of all other countries to shut them out of the international market until they play fair.
Unless it turns out that strong protections for intellectual property rights isn't correlated with the survival of a sovereign nation. Then it won't matter how loudly the international community complains; China will just do its thing. They're large enough and have the agricultural and industrial base to weather isolation in the way that Iran/Russia do not.
Or at least tone them down quite a bit. It's fair to have some degree of protection over an invention that required years of work of possibly multiple people, and a lot of money. But I don't see how protecting it for longer than ~5 years is justified.
Especially when your "invention" is just a vauge document describing something you have never built but now prevent anyone else from ever building it as well
Yes. In the US federal, state and local governments do not influence the decisions of business leaders. Occasionally there are exceptions at largest companies, like telecom and internet, but it is certainly true for small business. Note that I would make a distinction between "regulation" and "influence" in the following sense: 'don't dump waste into this lake' is a regulation. Hey Bob, why don't you dump your waste into Joe's backyard - I hate Joe and want to make his life miserable. That's influence. So are hiring/firing decisions, strategic partnerships, and such. The Communist Party in China is an authoritarian regime that accepts no legitimate limit on it's influence.
I'm not even sure if its possible to tell ownership these days. Here in Silicon Valley I saw some contracts I wasn't supposed to see - all with labels saying "disclosure not required" and "not legally required to provide copies". Basically, ownership can be held by a company, and that can be a legal casino, so it can place bets which transfer ownership to anyone in the future (eg. if support costs over 10% then 50% is owned by China). These documents were used to arrange Russian ownership of several NSA "front" companies - all without any public disclosures since they were potential futures, not current reality. That is the world we live in. (And I don't claim to really understand those contracts. I just know somebody who knows somebody who was working on the contracts for foreign entities to secretly hold ownership of a bunch of Silicon Valley companies. I took a look, saw the list of famous companies involved, and happen to know a couple of NSA front companies which were also on the list.) And in a court of law I will claim that I made all this up.
I assume it is patented, so won't this matter only for the Chinese domestic market? I assume internationally, they'd lose all their court cases, and injunctions would block any Chinese companies trying to sell these components to Western, Korean, or Japanese integrators.
True, but I also assume Samsung could take this case to the WTO and would get other nations to file friendly supporting briefs, perhaps leading to trade sanctions.
Eventually, the international community made be forced to make this expensive enough that the costs outweigh the benefits.
> I'll repeat it again, my solution would be: Support for Made in India 2025.
Greed won't disappear, but you can shift the balance to a more western friendly country.
They are already destroying a lot of countries. They borrow money to them, so the Chinese can build their infrastructure. But there are almost no locals involved, so all the artificial inflation goes to China. The belt is just an excuse for colonizing the world ( or at least the harbors, strategic airports that they themselves have built, see Sri Lanka, they are the first to comply).
I think a lot of those countries that built a dam with Chinese money forget that maintenance costs a lot also. Reference: FIFA football stadiums
One good reason is that while corruption in india is high there isn’t a government effort to obtain IP from all foreign concerns as there is in China and Russia.
We saw this with the Japanese bullet trains, we saw this with self driving tech, and now it's display tech.
You could argue that the consumers benefit the most over time. But it's definitely unfair to those who have dedicated their lives to researching these technologies, only to see it get stolen and even re-licensed as China's own (as what happened with the bullet trains).
The rest of the world should stop playing by Chinese's rules and be firm in their stance like the US - Eg. if China doesn't enforce strict IP rules, then people should seek alternatives and stop dealing with them. Even India/Vietnam/Malaysia/etc. are better bets in comparison. Especially when these schemes are sponsored by the Chinese government 9 times out of 10.