Edit: Question: In the post they talk about the Japanese taking photos of products. I'm not sure if I'm understanding what happened correctly, but if I am, shouldn't we make a distinction between just clever inference/reverse engineering (which is legal and done all the time) and outright IP theft/industrial espionage? I see IP theft/industrial espionage as being about stealing information not legally available to you, but reverse engineering and imitating a product are about trying to figure out how something works that you legally already have access to, and inferring things based on that. I feel like if a country has done the former, we shouldn't compare it to one that does the latter (currently apparently China)?
Or all the knowledge happily taken and used from Mendelesque cruel inhuman 'research' done in concentration camps. AFAIK no researcher was morally above and simply refused to work with those data.
So I've had cause to research this one in the past.
"All the knowledge"--most of the Nazi concentration camp research was absolute garbage. Turns out junk-science sadists create junk-science results and it is generally accepted that the overwhelming bulk Nazi concentration camp research was useless or near-useless as actual scientific research. I am unaware of any value being derived from the Josef Mengele work that you seem to be referring to--Gregor MenDel died sixty years before World War II, but please correct me if you're referring to someone else.
Some research from the Nazi concentration camp experiments is occasionally referred to, low-pressure/high-altitude research out of Dachau being arguably, as I understand it, the most valuable. (The other common cite, Rascher's freezing tests, were on nonrepresentative subjects and indicate that the moderate freezing that is safely and ethically studied is amplified, but does not step change, when freezing becomes extreme.) Where this data is used, it does not generally form the main body of research and mostly confirms what is known from other sources.
"Happily"--in the (rare) cases where Nazi findings are used, it's used with reluctance. There are evolving and hardening ethical codes around the use of this data as well, particularly from the 1980s onward; today, the use of any of this data must be explicitly detailed and the method of its collection is universally condemned.
Most troublingly for the pursuit of truth and some kind of decency, this argument typically is used as an ahistorical tu quoque, as is being done in this case. It's not a particularly good argument, though--even were it more than if-you-squint-and-pick-and-choose true.
Do you have any examples of papers which source such data? I'm curious to read the justification of it.
I think only Panda's out of that small list have their IP still protected and the rest got industrial-theft treatment over the centuries. Though in fairness - they do share Panda's.
But as an isolated example - I'll agree it is a weak one, but worth including for how it is treated as IP by the country.
“The Spies Who Launched America’s Industrial Revolution” https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
“Among those sniffing out innovations across the Atlantic was Harvard graduate and Boston merchant, Francis Cabot Lowell. As the War of 1812 raged on, Lowell set sail from Great Britain in possession of the enemy’s most precious commercial secret. He carried with him pirated plans for Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, which had made Great Britain the world’s leading industrial power.
Halfway across the Atlantic, a British frigate intercepted Lowell’s ship. Although the British double-searched his luggage and detained him for days, Lowell knew they would never find any evidence of espionage for he had hidden the plans in the one place they would never find them—inside his photographic mind. Unable to find any sign of spy craft, the British allowed Lowell to return to Boston, where he used Cartwright’s design to help propel the Industrial Revolution in the United States.”
But if you do want to run with something as ridiculous, the U.S. holds the largest prison population on the planet and effectively forces them to do labor at a criminal hourly rate, you could say that's not as far from slavery as many would like to think.
Just because somebody's a criminal does not mean they're no longer human and arguably many of these locked up are there for crimes that we're starting to realize perhaps shouldn't be criminalized in the first place.
"Operation Paperclip was a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) largely carried out by Special Agents of Army CIC, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to America for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959. Many were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party" [1]
1 - Stealing technology from one country and using it within your own country to increase your competitiveness.
2 - Stealing technology from one country and using it to build a competitive advantage for your firms in that first country (or any other country not your own).
The first, depending one which treaties your country is a part of, may not even be considered stealing. The second clearly is.
US did both of these things. That is, closed markets and protectionism and IP theft. It doesn't matter that, oh, "this was a long time ago, it doesn't count". It does. Advantages add up year after year, century after century. I'm not even trying to defend China, but instead, trying to be clear and honest about how these things work in the real world, regardless of sentiments and your favorite team.
I just did a quick lookup, you can do the same. I'm sure there are more examples out there.
In 1787, American agent Andrew Mitchell was intercepted by British authorities as he was trying to smuggle new technology out of the UK. His trunk was seized after being loaded on board a ship. Inside the trunk were models and drawings of one Britain's great industrial machines. Mitchell himself was able to escape and sought refuge in Denmark. But his mission marks the start of a sustained US campaign to steal technology from the world's hi-tech superpower of the day. [1]
[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-na...