The concept of strong IP doesn't really exist in their society. They look at is and scratch their head and think why are they making it so hard?

The concept of strong IP is relatively new, and most people don't respect it much when it gets in their way. That's why https://thepiratebay.org/ and https://sci-hub.tw/ are so popular.

On the other hand, many countries have laws on the books that protect IP, including China. For example, foreign plaintiffs in patent lawsuits in China have a win rate of 84.35%, higher than the 79.84% win rate of domestic plaintiffs: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2018/02/things-infringement-lit...

The real problem with IP infringement in China is that Western companies frequently don't notice when it happens, because they don't have contacts in the Chinese market. That's why TFA recommends the affected publishers report the infringement of their IP to get the app taken down.

This is specifically why SpaceX rarely patents anything. From a 2012 Wired article [0], Musk is on record as saying "We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book."

[0] https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/

Which is sad in part because trade secrets can hold back healthy competition for generations. At least with reasonably limited patents society as a whole can learn without resorting to spying, leaks, or expensive reverse engineering.

Parents can also be used to stifle competition.

I am not convinced the no patent world advances any slower than the patented and heavily litigated world.

> Which is sad in part because trade secrets can hold back healthy competition for generations.

What holds back healthy competition is having a deceiving competitor copy your protected work with no regard to your property or rights.

Why we keep working with them?

The article mentions that the app has thousands of books 'scanned from physical copies'...while reading books to our kid I've been struck by how many are printed in China so I wonder if getting access to the digital assets used in the printing process would be easier than scanning the produced books?

Hello! Author here. The company in question does not have connections with the publishing industry. It is basically a 1-1 tutoring platform gone rogue.

ah ok - quite a lot of effort must have gone into copying these books then I guess!

This is nothing "new", the real money is from printed books, not only China, Turkey too: ESL publishers buy books from eg. Greece then scan > photoshop to translate Greek to Turkish > publish, original publishers have no idea as its an off-the-net business, definitely the language barrier helps those kind of business.

Cool! How do you know about this happening in Turkey? The novelty here is probably in the online component and with Apple app store approval.

Yet Scribd remains.....

Yes, very similar to Scribd user uploaded content. I like Scribd, but I mainly use it for audio books,

On the other hand, publishers will not chase unless they see money. It is a new app, maybe it can grow into something valuable they publishers will be interested in getting some money. These books will be too expensive to sell anyway.

In reality, technology has moved beyond globally enforceable copyright protection for the written word.

That ship has sailed. New revenue streams, like audiobooks and companion videos/software/etc will become essential, if they are not already.

surprising that apple app store doesn't do much DD on content apps, esp. from a chinese app developer