It is very overdue and close to reaching a flashpoint. The markets have been getting slammed recently over trade war rumbles. Not sure how it will all end, but China really needs to fall in line with the RoW and adopt sane standards for intellectual property. This cannot go on.

Do you really think the rest of the world has "sane standards for intellectual property"?

> "sane standards for intellectual property"

You mean US standards for intellectual property... which are really Disney standards for intellectual property.

I'm not a US citizen and think that "US standards for intellectual property" are absolutely disgusting. A US company with no connection whatsoever to my country or its indigenous people has trademarked our word for hello/greetings/life/health.

Life plus 70yrs for copyright? WTF?

How about this for "sane standards of intellectual property": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997848

I hope you’re not a citizen of a signatory to the Berne Convention of 1886 which 90% of the world is part of either, 20 years not being much difference when it comes to principles of “US standards” and all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

> A US company with no connection whatsoever to my country or its indigenous people has trademarked our word for hello/greetings/life/health.

What's the word? Curious.

Not parent commenter but they may mean this: Bula (Fijian greeting) [1] The same article also mentions Aloha being trademarked followed by cease and desists being sent restaurants in Hawaii using the word.

[1] https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/366621/bula...

That's a bingo!

https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/367452/fiji...

I thought you were referring to "Hakuna Matata", which they nicked from Swahili and used in the Lion King. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-46384204

Sounds like a repeat offender to me.

Thanks for that link; I missed that news.

> The trademark does not mean that the company owns the phrase, or that it can ban anyone from using it. Disney filed the trademark upon the release of the original movie for clothing or footwear it sells in the United States, as a way to protect itself against other companies that might try to exploit the Disney brand.

These "trademark experts" have contradicted themselves there. The trademark prevents an African man from the race and culture that created the phrase, from selling clothing and footwear bearing that phrase. And I SMH at the claim that Hakuna Matata is a "Disney brand".

Google Allo maybe? It seems they have a trademark on that

Saner but not sane would be a better descriptor.

Compared to China? Definitely.

Yep I cannot wait to see the days when thousands of patent trolls are coming from China.

It will never happen. What's the worst case scenario, China cuts off its markets completely from western digital products? They already have.

I suppose that the worst case scenario is that the bond market gets involved. Ugly.

OTOH, maybe it's better to have a small conflict early rather than a large one later.

The worst case scenario is that tariffs and other measures against China slow down their economy enough that their real-estate bubble pops. The results of that could easily be political.

It's not early friend :(

Having said that, with the amount of Chinese wealth overseas I think there is a vested interest in keeping the status quo

Why are you confident that this isn't already "later"?

The worst for China is that we block them from our markets. Which Trump is trying to do

Even worse for China is if they are blocked from both US and EU markets. Like the US, Europe has found its IP and technology appropriated by China, so with the right strategy Trump might convince EU leaders to also take a hard line against China. Unfortunately Trump's world view doesn't allow for such a strategy.

The big obstacle to this strategy isn't Trump's world view, it's the structure of the EU itself. They just haven't been able to agree on a hard line against any kind of Chinese trade abuses. This has been a problem since well before Trump was elected.

China’s economy is very dependent on foreign markets, both for exports of its manufactured goods and for acquiring the commodities needed for that. Their currency peg further limits their options. If they go too low commodities become unaffordable and if they go too high exports lose competitiveness.

And some manufacturing jobs come back to the U.S.

Not likely. When manufacturing comes back to the US it's because the company calculated the cost of a US-based automated factory was less than the shipping + tariffs on the foreign-produced goods. If manual labor jobs leave China, they will go to other low-cost countries like Malaysia, Vietnam, etc. or be lost forever. Even producing things in Mexico can cut your labor cost in half in comparison to producing here.

An automated factory in the US is more US jobs than a factory in China. It is a net positive even though you don't get all the jobs back.

It could mean more US jobs, but it could also mean fewer if you look more broadly.

Say US companies are having PCBs manufactured in China because that's currently the cheapest option. You cut off that option and US companies are forced use more expensive domestic options. The effects of that can ripple through US companies that directly or indirectly depend on PCBs, and the jobs lost throughout the economy could be greater than the jobs gained from the new automated factories.

The gains by US producers will be outweighed by losses to US consumers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss

In addition, much of the gain will accrue to a smaller number of business owners, while the losses will be spread across the wider public.

Inevitably, those in control will manipulate the situation to their own advantage.

More importantly it's a strategic positive. Productive capacity is defense capacity. Buying gewgaws, knickknacks, and flipflops from a strategic competitor is one thing, buying defense technology is another, and it's not the path to security.

Exactly. They wouldn’t go from China to the US. They’d go from China to somewhere closer to the economic factors of China - India, Brazil, etc

The worst case scenario for China is a complete decoupling of the US economy from China. If US manufacturing is going to remain offshore it should be diversified across many countries with similar values rather than centralized in one country with values completely contrary to those of the US.

All Chinese information technology companies should be banned from operating within the United States. Tick toc, weibo, baidu, etc. Also ban trading with their hardware companies.

Either a deal will be made or the existing relationship between the United States and China is finished.

> The worst case scenario for China is a complete decoupling of the US economy from China.

This is impossible, even if someone wanted to do this (which is like saying you want to commit suicide) they couldn't.

A complete 100% decoupling may be impossible but the US is not so reliant on China that a 90% decoupling could be considered suicide. It would take effort and would result in many lost dollars but the US could move its manufacturing out of China.

>but China really needs to fall in line with the RoW and adopt sane standards for intellectual property

Maybe US and China should adopt Russian standards of IP?

I don't think it's specifically about China, but with international issues of trademarks.

Look at ugg boots, considered generic in Australia and New Zealand, but aggressively trademarked by Dekkers elsewhere in the world, including the USA. Producers from Australia can't use the name when exporting.

Or Supreme Italy, which makes knockoff supreme-branded goods legally. Samsung recently did a collab with them and Supreme the US brand wasn't too happy.

Or Budweiser Budvar (sidenote: at a conference earlier this year I had the pleasure of seeing a Czech person at a different table order Budweiser thinking it was the Czech beer... He was not happy with the result).

huh. TIL. Never knew that was a generic name.

In Australia, it was considered a type of shoe like a "boot". We got really annoyed when a US company trademarked an Australian product and then stopped Australian companies from selling it under the name they had been using for decades.

Sort of like this exact case...

Thank you for posting this. A timely reminder that the problem isn't China, or any country in specific - the problem is greed.

It's not even closely related to any brand here. It's completely generic. Most of the time the ugg boots producers are really small businesses and you purchase locally made ones.

A possible solution would be the [australian] government trademarking their traditional product names or a similar variant, and then acting as umbrella for thousands of australian small companies. Granting a free use of the term and defense against predatory practices. A sort of shared trademark.

Maybe should be named uggstralian boots from now on.

Why should it be named uggstralian now? It's an offensive suggestion. Do you think generic American words,like Pickup truck or Hamburger, should be able to be trademarked and then America would need to change the word?

> Why should it be named uggstralian now?

Because "ugg boots" is now a trademark, therefore unavailable for everybody else, whereas "hamburger" is not.

Can you provide a better name?

It is overdue but it's being prosecuted under a flawed understanding of almost all aspects of the situation and inane and unfocused policy. You tackle China first while building an economic coalition of interests with shared goals. A sane and competent person would focus on one task at a time and not undercut the strategic interests required to achieve that task, achieving perhaps effectively nothing.

I agree. I don't think I actually have an issue with the trade war, but I have lots wrong with how the current administration is going about it, and I don't have any faith in their ability to extract a positive outcome from China.

Reminds me of the Bill Hicks joke about being 'for the war, but against the troops'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_whePVoqOY

China says it is their national right to hack and copy... No US President sane or not will be able to overcome that.

Its major competitors spent 2 centuries actively attacking & sabotaging it (a fact that the US population doesn't seem aware of), seems fair.

There must be a difference between stealing the formula to gun powder vs. downloading the software and engineering for a F-35 plane.

This is my biggest complaint with Trump's tactics as well. If he didn't view EVERYTHING as a zero sum game, he and whatever coalition he could assemble would be much more credible when it comes to tariffs and threats. It's a shame that TPP wasn't passed because it would've really helped here.

>If he didn't view EVERYTHING as a zero sum game, he and whatever coalition he could assemble would be much more credible when it comes to tariffs and threats.

Thank fuck he does, quite frankly. We all dodged a bullet there.

This isn't a children's playground.

There could've been a targeted dispute over IP. But instead what has happened is that a range of tariffs are involved which has resulted in Trump just giving $16 billion to farmers. Some of whom are now planting crops with no intention to sell but purely to get money from the US government.

In fact, borrowing $16 billion from China to give it to farmers hurt by tariffs against China.

Maybe I don't get your point but a tariff is a tax, and US consumers pay for a lot of that tax. So this is effectively a super inefficient redistribution of wealth to farmers from everyone else in the country.

That's all true. But the tariffs China places on US agricultural products aren't a tax on US consumers, and don't produce revenue for the US.

So American farmers are losing export sales due to Chinese tariffs, the sting of which Trump is trying to reduce by paying the farmers. Those payments probably aren't funded by tariff revenue collected by the US. So they'll probably be paid for through borrowing. Which may mean borrowing from China.

Most of our borrowing we do from ourselves, so technically only some fraction of that came from China.

But yeah, your point is still a good one.

Out of interest, could you share the context for why you chose your username?

Ahh, was just checking my assumptions. I have members of my family who still complain about having to call Zimbabwe Zimbabwe and who have old SA flags from the '70's, despite them not being from Africa, if you catch my drift, so I was not so subtly digging. For reference, I find it about as disconcerting as if someone decided to call themselves 'ConstantinopleKnight', or similar. If my uncle called himself 'RhodesianHunter' online, he would definitely not be referencing the dog breed.

I've used this username in various forms pretty much since usernames were a thing. It's only in the past couple of years that people have started asking me about it in this context. Is there a reason as far as you know that the history of Rhodesia has suddenly become more interesting to people with no real connection?

I'm sadly going to have to pick something else next time around.

Well, in the UK we have the people who long for the heyday of empire as well as the folk who treat skin tone as a sports team, and both groups are on the telly a lot more recently, though I don't think have actually increased in number. As an indication of the connotations, some people here may refer to Zimbabwe as Rhodesia as an indication that they support aparthied and some others may do it out of a misguided nostalgia for the days when we were in charge of stuff.

Dylan Roof, the white supremacist perpetrator of the 2015 Charleston church shooting, had a website called "The Last Rhodesian" and wore a jacket with Rhodesian and apartheid-era South African emblems.

Sigh. That's too bad. Thanks for the info!

Not many.

How would TPP have helped?

The whole point of TPP was to strengthen trade links between Asia/Pacific nations except China. Which would have helped strengthen TPP member defenses against trade moves by China.

Good luck isolating China from its Asian neighbors, I expect that plan will backfire spectacularly.

Well, everyone else involved in drafting the TPP is still in it. So China's Asian neighbors must see some value in it. Only the US dropped out.

Having a multinational agreement between several economies that the Chinese economy is hugely dependent on would have been a great trade chip for getting China on board with Western IP laws. That was the whole point of the deal in the first place.

I read your comment once thinking it said something, but I couldn't remember what. So then I read it again, and again, then suddenly realized you didn't actually say anything at all. You could replace the single word "China" with just about anything and it would carry the same semantic weight.

> It is overdue but it's being prosecuted under a flawed understanding of almost all aspects of the situation and inane and unfocused policy.

What is the understanding, who understands it, and why is their understanding flawed? What is the policy? Why is the policy inane and unfocused? What is the correct understanding and what would be the substantive and focused policy?

> You tackle China first while building an economic coalition of interests with shared goals.

Which aspect of China should be tackled--just IP or something else? Who should be part of the coalition? Or do you mean with other nations? Which goals are shared? Why are those the goals? How are those goals different from the goals held by those who have a flawed understanding, or do they share the same goals?

> A sane and competent person would focus on one task at a time and not undercut the strategic interests required to achieve that task, achieving perhaps effectively nothing.

Who is insane and incompetent person to which you seek to draw a contrast? What is it about their position that leads to the evaluation they are mentally deranged or incompetent? What are the multiple tasks they are focused on? Which one particular task should they focus on? Why is it necessary to focus on one task? Are they the correct tasks? What are the strategic interests? Who holds those strategic interests? Are they they the correct strategic interests? Why are they undercutting those strategic interests? How do those strategy-level issues affect the implementation-level tasks? What would be achieved if their tasks and strategies were aligned?

Just because the comment assumes a great deal of contextual knowledge does not mean that it "says nothing". Your response on the other hand...

Answering all of your posed questions would take quite a bit of typing and is probably better suited to a blog post, of which I'm sure there are many you could Google.

I'm not sure why you bothered to respond?

As someone who is often guilty of making vague statements, I appreciate this comment.

Chinas position on IP is a complicated mess. Considering their political and economic background as well as their position in international politics, I can kinda understand why they don't have much interest in honouring the creations of others.

There are tradeoffs to either a file first system like in China or a first to use system like in the US.