note: I was involved in early tech standardization on 3GPP for many years. yes Huawei contributes a lot. That doesn't mean they also don't steal your shit. They do it because there literally is no way to hold them accountable. You just got to make sure you don't travel to a country that may extradite you to the US. And by the way they are _not_ the leader in 5G. This is constantly parroted propaganda. You can get the same "mature" Tech for 5G from Ericsson, Nokia ... yes Huawei might have more patents but you can only sell what the standard supports in terms of interoperability, and so the constant claim that the only 5G player is Huawei is plain wrong.
[1] obviously we didn't use github to manage our source code.
I suspect this happens in other countries too, but I think elsewhere people make an effort to be less obvious about it. I get the impression copy paste programming isn't as looked down upon here as it is in the west.
I mean, in Europe salespeople routinely take customer contact-lists with them whenever they move, everybody knows it. Developers do the equivalent stuff in their field. Asians are just a bit more blunt about it, because they have less to lose. Plenty of Europeans did the same sort of thing when moving to the US in 18th/19th century - I call it "hungry makes right".
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/19/21187651/anthony-levandow...
Imaginary property only worked when all jurisdictions agreed to follow the same rules, and could enforce these rules onto individual actors. Obviously China isn't playing by these rules and has no desire to play by these rules, regardless of any lip service paid. So we can either adjust our own philosophies to better match how the real world operates. Or we can continue trying to force our rules on everyone else, which will end catastrophically when reality finally does catch up.
Countries always act in what they perceive to be their best interests.
Ergo, there will always be tension over rules that further those interests and rules that act counter to them.
Pharma patents have historically been a major example. Disempowering smaller countries in their negotiations with pharmaceutical companies (via mandatory IP enforcement) tilts the playing field in favor of corporations headquartered in first world countries.
So, even in the most lawful of times (2000s?), it's a constantly shifting landscape.
While China may have ignored more rules than most, the existing rules certainly didn't favor them, and they believed they had the power to ignore them.
We'll see where that ends up.
Yet all of this seems completely unknown in the West, outside of the legal/business community that actually engages with the Chinese IP system. The same comments about there being no IP enforcement in China are made over and over again, completely disregarding the massive changes that have occurred.
You can argue that Ericsson and Nokia are equals to Huawei in 5G technology. But Huawei are by far the leaders in 5G equipment sales.
This is the problem with China, they unashamedly want to eat the hand that feeds them. Even in China there’s a saying, somethink like “Don’t wake up the sleepy giant” in reference to the US’ lax policy in dealing with this. They, the Chinese themselves, think that the US is dumb for letting them get away with so much.
In 2019, Huawei had the 5th largest R&D budget of any company in the world. Its R&D budget was larger than that of Apple.[1]
> They, the Chinese themselves, think that the US is dumb for letting them get away with so much.
What are you basing this on? It might surprise you to know that China has established dozens of specialized IP courts since 2014, which now handle hundreds of thousands of cases per year. What you're saying sounds like pure prejudice, born out of a lack of knowledge.
1. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-01-11/chart-of-the-day-hua...
Friendships among nations is a very relative term.
What you describe is just less attempts by chinese to cover up their tracks, since it doesn't matter that much now.
Right?
I think there are certain lines that aren't supposed to be crossed. You'll notice in the U.S. that Uber and Levandowski were sued by Waymo. Why? Because they stole source code. If "everybody is doing it" surely Waymo would just chalk it up to business as usual right?
I guess you could say, well in the U.S. we enforce certain standards blah blah... exactly. There are certain standards. You can play dirty within certain limits. The U.S. doesn't have a national policy of having companies steal stuff from trading partners. If I, as a U.S. citizen, started hacking into Chinese companies and stealing their source code, set up an operation to call and scam old Chinese ladies out of their life savings, or any of that I'd be in serious shit. In China it's business as usual because the CCP has an unofficial policy of "steal as much as possible and fuck em".
I really don't like when people try and normalize CCP actions or equate their actions with the U.S. or Europe for that matter. It's nonsense and self-hating.
It really depends on how much valuable stuff you got
I mean, look at the number of contributions to the 5G standards by company in this document, and compare the positions of Huawei, Qualcomm and Cisco: https://www.iplytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Who-Lead... (page 9).
What are they supposed to steal there? They literally are defining what 5G is.