On the second point, I disagree.
IP is not some basic, natural law. It's a relatively recent invention, ostensibly invented to promote certain economic incentives. Why is china morally obligated to respect it?
At any given point in time, the biggest effect of an IP system is how it affects the current portfolio of patents & copyrights. That's what tends to dictate the rules. When copyright law is updated, it's the impact on Disney's IP asset portfolio that's considered... not future works that will be created. It's a similar dynamic for patents.
Why should china (or any country) have to subscribe to an IP system under which they don't own as many patents.
Meanwhile, the benefits of a patent system are contraversial, even dubious (imho). Lots of intelligent peoe think they do more harm than good. The billions spent by tech companies on patent lawyers are a case-in-poiny.
I do not think we (globally) are best served by a global IP monolith. This is one area where we can benefit from a diversity of rules.
> At any given point in time, the biggest effect of an IP system is how it affects the current portfolio of patents & copyrights. That's what tends to dictate the rules. When copyright law is updated, it's the impact on Disney's IP asset portfolio that's considered... not future works that will be created. It's a similar dynamic for patents.
> Why should china (or any country) have to subscribe to an IP system under which they don't own as many patents.
To an extent I agree with you. There are a great many problems with the current state of "Intellectual Property" law and I there's some merit to the argument that it would benefit humanity as a whole if it were scaled back drastically or even eliminated entirely.
However, China not only does not enforce US patents and copyrights but also engages in extensive industrial espionage to steal trade secrets. Even if we did not have copyright and patent law, such actions would and should still be illegal. Qualitatively, I think there's a big difference between reverse-engineering and making your own version of some company's product, and hacking into their servers and stealing the data to make it or paying an employee of theirs to exfiltrate the source artifacts for you.
Chinese companies do both. The former is sometimes permissible, at other times may violate patent or copyright law, which may or may not be seen as a bad thing depending on your views of the matter. But the latter should be rightfully condemned.
There's also the argument that even if patents are granted too freely and abused, and copyright extended far too long, that if China wants to engage in the world economy then they need to play by the same rules as everyone else, and that if they do not play by those rules then other countries are entirely justified in retaliating.
I find them different ways of accomplishing the same thing: securing a business edge
Onavo, a VPN that secretly did device-wide spying, doesn't count as a "hack" because...?
Unless you play by the same rules, free trade is unfair.
That argument is extremist, imo. It creates a dichotomy between trade or sovereignty. Want your own environmental laws, liability laws, pension schemes, oh&s rules? No trade for you.
It leads to both conflict, and the extension of the massive and very problematic trade agreements into every every facet of legislation.
IP laws can stay local. I agree on the middle point. Whatever the case for china making its own IP laws, they need to follow their own rule of law. Hacking/stealing is not justifiable. Deciding that pharma patents are not valid in China is.
>>Why should china (or any country) have to subscribe to an IP system under which they don't own as many patents.
Is is fine if I steal from you because I don't have as much money as you do?
Or, would you prefer that I don't "subscribe to" your notion of money in your pocket as wealth because I don't have as much and therefore it is perfectly moral to take yours?
Come on - let's have a rational discussion here.
The world might be a better place if everyone stole and remixed IP
Just like it makes sense for the US to enact and attempt to enforce restrictive IP laws on a global scale.
Make no mistake once China ascends they will enforce their will on the world just like the US has done and it will be ugly.
Say goodbye to democracy. Say goodbye to due process. Say hello to coercive IP law. Say hello to unimaginably restrictive DRM and surveillance.
Is there a similar situation in China? My sense was that the culture was much less restrictive -- all is fair, it's not worth the time and money to sue someone else into oblivion.
China has overthrown harsh rulers many more times than the US has, even taking into account the latter's short and young history. The last time was in 1912, and very plausibly arguably 1949 too. (The Nationalists were pretty bad, objectively speaking.)
"the complexity of the Chinese political situation" = "China has overthrown harsh rulers many more times than the US has" is itself a simplification.
So is this video, it's also a simplification, but more importantly, it's one of several lines in the sand: China aside, I don't want that where I live. Period. Western companies have already started to censor themselves to not offend China, and this must stop.
Of course what I said is an oversimplification. It's meant to directly make you question your deep underlying assumptions, and your own oversimplifications. The government has a lot of power on paper both now and historically. Yet despite this, rebellions have still occurred regularly, and this core central power did not historically cause China to go and colonise other countries committing atrocities there. Perhaps something is missing from your own US-centric legalist analysis?
> It's meant to directly make you question your deep underlying assumptions
"Deep underlying" being code for being made up by you on the spot?
> The government has a lot of power on paper both now and historically. Yet despite this, rebellions have still occurred regularly
The last time 1949? So, not since modern, industrialized totalitarianism took hold. That's like talking about cancer by describing the life of a person before contracting cancer.
> this core central power did not historically cause China to go and colonise other countries committing atrocities there
They already are causing Western media to censor themselves even on sites blocked in China. Mercedes Benz apologized three times for even quoting the Dalai Lama, just an inspirational quote. For me, that's three times too many. And just like I'm not over the Iraq war being a war of aggression, I will not forget or forgive this, either. You do you.
> your own US-centric legalist analysis?
Again you assumptions about my assumptions. If anything, being German, my "analysis" (of which you quote nothing, don't engage with at all) is Nazi-based.
This isn't on the same scale as "enforce their will on the world", and nowhere near US-levels of "enforce their will". (Not justifying this sort of action however.)
My point is you and the earlier poster are happy to extrapolate small events into big ones in a way that doesn't match the historical record. The officials of the Chinese government are not stupid and can't go too far from public opinion, which is generally more principled that you (and other US-centric "analysers") give them credit for, being too focused on the laws and ignoring many "facts on the ground". (Not implying rule-of-law is a bad thing.)
> being German,
Germany has been under US influence since 1945, so my saying your analysis is US-centric is not too far off the mark. There are differences and also similarities.
Mercedes Benz apologized profusely. If the CCP will have their way, their murders will never have happened. The same is not true for the US, not even remotely. If that was the case, Noam Chomsky and others would have been murdered in the 70s or something. But here he is, one of the most prolific intellectuals. He gets smeared a lot, but there is still a giant difference.
That vimeo video you don't seem to be able to comment on directly is evidence of a very principled public opinion indeed, principled by fear, as a result of torture and murder.
> Germany has been under US influence since 1945, so my saying your analysis is US-centric is not too far off the mark.
More importantly, "saying your analysis is US-centric" means nothing. It's not a concrete criticism of anything I said. Your whole argument seems to be the US is worse, so how am I the US-centric one? All I'm hearing is, you're using one set of tyrants and murderers, US aggression and world influence, to justify another sets of tyrants and murderers, while saying "not justifying it however".
Until it becomes unprofitable to invest in innovation
https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo (Secret History of Silicon Valley - Computer History Museum, Mountain View)
In reality capitalism only took over after massive (debt based!) spending by (US) government during WWII. The risky stuff doesn't happen in companies. Even things like e-cars and rockets, see Elon Musk and his companies as the most prominent examples, didn't invent any of the basics. They just take well-established concepts.
It's not either or, it's specialization: The low-probability-of-success stuff for larger society (government mostly, at this point), and when there is something to build on the more focused business people and entrepreneurs who want to see an ROI are better at executing from there on.
But, back to the comment you replied to, basic research, the risky stuff, is better off being open and available.
If so, do you think that the world will do just fine if we removed large financial rewards for "shallow innovation" like the smartphone, new drugs, medical devices, software, etc?
everyone building out a new technology borrowed ideas freely without compensating the real innovators (of course, implementation can be the more difficult piece)
As long as governments subsidize public universities and research departments, there will exist a font of innovation
This is such a sweeping statement it's just false
> everyone building out a new technology borrowed ideas freely without compensating the real innovators (of course, implementation can be the more difficult piece)
Implementation is innovation too
> As long as governments subsidize public universities and research departments, there will exist a font of innovation
We need both
If you open your economy when you are relatively undeveloped and weak then foreign companies will immediately occupy your economy and you can forget about creating national 'champions'.
China is not a closed market but they are careful not to fall into that trap.
And they remix the ideas of western tech and often improve upon it. WeChat is orders of magnitude more convenient than what the US has to offer. Everything is centralized and integrated, what Google tries to do, but adopted everywhere. Book anything, pay for anything, tap phone to pay for anything. I don't expect many places to take phone payments. In China, most everywhere can take phone payments.
Their social networks also seem to do great at getting things naturally viral. I posted a random video without any boosting and it got like 1.5K views in a day.
Fascism has it's good points!
Seriously though, WePay isn't innovation - we could have that right now in the West. Citibank could make an app that would allow peer-to-peer money transfers with QR codes the way WePay works. It would be smooth and easy. You'd just have to have a Citibank account. After a while, everyone could get an account with Citibank and it would be great! The other banks wouldn't like it, but whatevs.
Then Citibank would realize they were the gatekeepers of the digital peer-to-peer economy and they would seek rent. Transaction fees would increase. Monthly account fees would sky-rocket. Eventually, the govt would realize this was a drain on commerce and would seek to regulate and maybe even break up Citibank, but in a rule-OF-law nation, the govt would actually have to go to court and Citibank would get to argue their case against govt intervention. It could take YEARS! Look at how long it took the govt to prosecute IBM back in the day!
Meanwhile, if Tencent gets too greedy with WePay, the govt just makes their CEO disappear. In fact, in a fascist state, having monopolies is an ADVANTAGE! It's one throat to throttle - if there's a problem, there's just one CEO you need to kill.
WePay isn't innovative - it's just something that works particularly well in a fascist state. Getting the whole banking industry to agree to communicate and cooperate on a common mobile payment system is a bit more difficult...
Update - s/rule-by-law/rule-OF-law/
The "feature" of WeChat is that it can be used for almost anything. It is a cash successor more so that a card alternative. Anyone can print, display or scan a QR code. Doesn't matter if it is a store, a friend or a random person. Doesn't matter if it is in the physical world, on a website or in a chat. And it is easy to do. And almost everyone uses it.
Contactless cards only matches WeChat in the same way something like Apple Pay does.
The more secure analogy comparable in price would be solutions like Square and PayPal Here. Smartphones are ubiquitous.
As the other reply says too, any shop can set this up easily. I challenge you to take contactless payments in your home country, it's nothing like simply getting a qr payment and involves merchant banking.
I've seen tiny remote rural village stores that would never even imagine having a visa PoS terminal with big wechat payment signs out front.
Since y combinator new is most frequented by people from the US and other western nations that are having this conflict with China right now, my belief is that their emotions guide their logic. So everything that China does is bad and western countries are the victims. Which is the narrative that is also being strongly pushed in the American media and to a smaller extent other western media.
But as a Singaporean living in Asia, I don't see anything wrong with China's development path. It is developing the same way as almost every other industrialised nation in the world did. First by blatant disregard for IP and then slowly as it progresses up the economic ladder, it provides more and more protection for IP. China today and China ten years ago is vastly different in terms of the amount of the strength of its IP protection enforcement. And with its current trajectory, it will be vastly stronger in ten years still. With regards to barriers to imports, China has less barriers than most of the other developing nations and reducing sharply each year.
Instead of recognising this fact and working to hasten IP protections, America seems to me to be going on a mutually destructive path that is bad for everyone in the region if not the world. That makes me suspect this is not really about IP and prosperity but power which unlike the former, is zero-sum.
Its one thing for the average person on the street, but I don't understand why intelligent people in the West find it so difficult to separate facts from fiction and emotions from logic.
Lastly, I would like to add. There is nothing inherently moral or immoral about IP. It's just a way for the incumbents to protect their position. Making this a moral problem (Chinese bad because they steal IP) is not the right approach.
Of course this is just one aspect of development and there is no silver bullet. Those who succeeded used protectionism and controlled opening of their economy as part of a broader strategy, governance, and culture.
I first encountered this when economists kept attacking rent control saying it destroyed cities, while Montreal remained the best place to live in all of North America.
Then I found this interesting essay about economists finally getting to try out an experiment about sweatshops in Africa, and concluding "Everything We Knew About Sweatshops Was Wrong":
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/do-sweatshops-lif... > > In the 1990s, Americans learned more about the appalling conditions at the factories where our sneakers and T-shirts were made, and opposition to sweatshops surged. But some economists pushed back. For them, the wages and conditions in sweatshops might be appalling, but they are an improvement on people’s less visible rural poverty. > >As the economist Joan Robinson said, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” > >Textbook economics offers two reasons factory jobs can be “an escalator out of poverty.” First, a booming industrial sector should raise wages over time. Second, boom or not, factory jobs might be better than the alternatives: Unlike agriculture or informal market selling, these factories pay a steady wage, and if workers gained skills valued by the market, they might earn higher wages. Factories may also have incentives to pay more than agricultural or informal market work to persuade workers to stay and be productive. > >Expecting to prove the experts right, we went to Ethiopia and — working with the Innovations for Poverty Action and the Ethiopian Development Research Institute — performed the first randomized trial of industrial employment on workers. Little did we anticipate that everything we believed would turn out to be wrong.
Never blindly trust an "economics textbook" lol. When you disagree with them, economists say "read a textbook", and when you point out the models are bad, they pivot to "it's just a textbook, real models are much more complex than that" (they tend not to be).
Macroeconomics is not a healthy field making rapid progress. David D. Friedman’s verdict on it is that we know very little is true but we know plenty that isn’t. If you want to see someone really ripping into macro read Paul Romer’s The Trouble With Macroeconomics[1]. All that said I know what happens when you contract the money supply; you get a recession. Print lots of money; you’ll get inflation. Decrease inflation; your currency will appreciate. There’s plenty more like that. Purchasing power parity works as a theory of exchange rate formation over the long run and nothing does over the short run. Macroeconomists know plenty.
Regarding theory and replication, on rent control I see Montreal and raise you Mumbai[2]. If the rent controlled price is near the market price the damage will be pretty mild. If you haven’t allowed rents to rise since the 1960’s things will be worse. On replication, more than three quarters of cancer biology papers don’t replicate so the fact that some economics papers get retracted doesn’t disturb me too greatly[3]. If you’re doing science sometimes you find out you were wrong or that you made a mistake.
[1]https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fh4tPWYeks
https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/2sEX5MD7aW1whVkxFllNCL/Rent...
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/04/tw...
[3]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/what-pro...
> In 2011, Bayer Healthcare said that its in-house scientists could only validate 25 percent of basic studies in cancer and other conditions. (Drug companies routinely do such checks so they can use the information in those studies as a starting point for developing new drugs.) A year later, Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis from Amgen said that the firm could only confirm the findings in 6 out of 53 landmark cancer papers—just 11 percent. Perhaps, they wrote, that might explain why “our ability to translate cancer research to clinical success has been remarkably low.”
You invoked "economics textbooks" like some kind of conversation-ender, and I showcased several things economists treat as hard natural law that end up being, at best, oddly amiss in key cases:
- Rent control (Montreal has it, best city in North America)
- Free trade (China doesn't do it, most reduction of poverty world-wide)
- Sweatshops are desired (Except in a controlled experiment where they are not imposed, they are rejected)
- Debt is bad (Incredibly damaging pro-austerity garbage study boosted in spite its flaws)
Feel free to make each subsequent case on its own merits and evidence as you understand it, but please don't point at economists and act like they possess an authority that they do not.
And preponderance of studies doesn't eclipse a key result. Montreal routinely ranks as the best city on the continent, so even if something "works in most places", it doesn't mean it's something you should pursue when you're trying to be the best, or when you're trying to do well by yourself and not trying to be the best. You surely know about the economics "Theory of the Second Best"?
For example, India doesn't have Alibaba or Tencent or whatever because they allowed in foreign companies with stronger currencies too soon.
USA set the rules after WW2. China played the game according to those rules. Countries that didn't were either smashed economically or by warfare.
That's a great way to copyright reform right there!
If the companies are willingly going to the Chinese markets on their own accord under an IP sharing agreement, you can no longer use the term "force". They have a choice to not share it by not entering the market. You can critique this as an inherent weakness of capitalism, but China is not forcing anybody in this situation.
And why would they have to steal it if its already shared? This doesn't even make any sense.
That's a big big stretch. It's more open than a big part of Western countries.
1. There is a blanket ban on anything media related
2. Select heavy industries
3. Defence
4. Agriculture *production*