Regardless of attitudes towards commercial IP, most countries take it pretty seriously when defense-related research is stolen. You might get off the hook in China for stealing commercial IP, but I doubt you'd get the same response for violating research agreements with the PLA.

That's not true. France constantly steals US Defence tech. China constantly steals Russian tech and they are still on good terms. The US probably also tried to steal what it can from everyone, and we know the US facilitated industrial espionage of German companies.

Also, China is pretty different in that the PLA allows their researchers to publish a lot of research that gives away their capabilities in sensitive domains like EW and submarine warfare. I'm not sure they would react massively to something that doesn't even entail any information leaking.

> That's not true. France constantly steals US Defence tech. China constantly steals Russian tech and they are still on good terms. The US probably also tried to steal what it can from everyone, and we know the US facilitated industrial espionage of German companies.

Can you tell me more or what to look for? I just remember an Israel stole some classified stuff and was sent to prison, an ally stealing secrets but I thought it was a rare occurrence.

I don't mean that it doesn't happen or that defense agencies keep everything a secret -- I mean that people routinely go to prison for leaking defense tech that wasn't supposed to be leaked.

China stole a lot of the fighter jet blueprints like this stealth one. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/hacked-how-china-stol...

What is the US response? I don't even know.

The US extradited the guy from Canada who did it and put him in federal prison, there were increasing threats of sanctions, and Obama met with Xi to talk about it.

I remember this other case too, look at all he stole, and almost 4 years in prison, I am sure he will learn his lesson and never do it again. https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/15/12196872/chinese-man-us-p...

>increasing threats of sanctions

So threats, no real sanctions, not that the steel sanctions did anything, somehow Vietnam started selling us all their steel after we sanction China for other reasons.

My point above is, that’s a lot more than will happen for pirating a DVD in China.

Some vague threat that had no teeth?

What happened? Nobody will be discouraged by such a short term sentence, and be emboldened by its opportunity cost.

> It was when the US stole British IP

Was it really stealing?

The British pretty much did nothing to stop it nor protected their IP. They certainly didn't strongly enforce it.

Contrast that with Chinese theft; as soon as counterfeit products or patent infringing ones make it to US soil they are promptly seized and destroyed if found to be infringing the laws.

I'm no fan of Chinese IP theft, but it is not true that the British did nothing to protect their IP. When Francis Lowell [1] went to Britain to learn about cotton mills, he could find nothing printed, and I believe it was illegal to take notes out of the country. At any rate, he was searched when he left, but he had studied the machinery and memorized plans for it. When he got back, he built the first textile mill in the US.

I think publishers in the young United States, having no copyright laws on sheet music, blatantly copied sheet music from British publishers. However, I'm not able to find a source on that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Cabot_Lowell

> but he had studied the machinery and memorized plans for it

Did he? There's no evidence for that.

To me, it sounds like a smart Harvard grad just figured out a few missing pieces required to get textile manufacturing going. Wasn't his first time doing industrial processes at scale either: he successfully ran a distillery before that.

It's also interesting to remember that it happened at a time England was in open war against the United States. It's not really the same right now with Chinese companies trying to get into the US market and vice versa. Both countries claim to be allied but there's a clear disregard for the laws of one particular country!

Maybe a better analogy to what Francis Lowell did would be operation paperclip. The US did steal technology from Germany at the end of the war [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

Germany was stripped by vultures, the AK-47 is also said to have come from Germany design, methadone is a nazi drug, our warming methods for people submerged in cold is from human experiments on tortured and frozen prisoners.