Nationalistic flamewars are particularly nasty and particularly avoidable. No more of this, please.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30071505.
* When Chinese were ahead, European stole and smuggled manufacturing technologies from China.
* Industrial revolution in the United States was started by ruthlessly stealing the British innovations. Samuel Slater -- the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" -- is known as "Slater the Traitor" in Britain.
* Japanese stole and copied every design and technology from the US and Europe they could from the start of Meiji era 1868- to 1960s.
Piracy is not a theft in a sense that it's just illegal, not fundamentally immoral. I think it's actually cool historical constant that moves the world ahead.
In as much as the Chinese firms (which in many cases are quasi-state-owned) that do the theft are breaking treaty and contractual commitments, then the piracy is both illegal, and immoral. Not honoring binding commitments is wrong.
I have personal experience with this, with, as it happens, Huawei, who licensed code from the European company I worked for, used it far more widely than the license permitted, and then, when we attempted to negotiate a broader license, simply dropped their license entirely, continuing to use the code until they had reverse engineered it and could generate new instantiations on independently of us. (That much I know to be true; I actually suspect, but don't have conclusive evidence, that employees of our Chinese subsidiary who went to work for Huawei stole source code on their way out the door, making most of the reverse engineering a simple hiring decision for Huawei. I also have reasonable evidence that another Chinese firm did the same with a major American technology company I later worked for, although again, it's difficult to prove).
IP law is an attempt to recognize that there's some value in granting limited term immoral monopolistic rights because it net produces a better result longer term. That doesn't mean that IP law itself doesn't open up an immoral land grab and is itself open to abuse. Similarly, we obviously recognize that the commitments themselves may be immoral & thus can be broken (e.g. marriage to an unfaithful spouse) or licenses with immoral clauses should be free to be broken (e.g. you can't sell yourself into bondage).
That's not to say that your experience isn't one where the other player was immoral. I'm just trying to broaden the horizon of the discussion beyond your personal story to how we should think about IP more broadly. It's nowhere near as clear cut as you make it and that illusion stems from how the Western legal and education systems work (which is a whole other topic - passing off another's work in education is "plagiarism" whereas if you do it literature it's "ghost writing").
It's only piracy if others do it, isn't it.
Good luck trying to sue the Chinese military for contract breach of installing software on more computers than specified...
Further, note that this is an instance of piracy versus IP theft that then directly competes with the original source, as a coordinated playbook with government support to advance local industries. It's pretty much apples & oranges.
As almost all companies that relied on their productivity to get ahead. China does blatantly copy tech in some cases. Companies accepted that risk.
Of course it is good for China to copy the technology, it is not that other nations are exempt from industrial espionage. That they do it so openly is due to the leverage they have.
I'll start with: I know I can never be unbiased about this.
But I'm much more comfortable with the US (and Europe, and other democratic societies) engaging in this sort of common-good "theft" than a country like China. The US et al. are of course flawed in our implementation of democratic principles, but I do not look forward to living under Chinese global political/economic dominance. I do not believe an authoritarian government in that position would be a good outcome for humanity.
I think there is room for robust discussion and argument on how long, and for what, patents or other pure ip protection should be granted. I don't believe permanently hiding knowledge, or locking it for indefinite time in the vaults of a single rent-seeking entity is right. But enforcemenbt of time and circumstance limited exclusivity is arguably worth some cost to society, as a means of incenting people and companies to invest in commercializing their innovation. Violating the agreed rules around those things - whether those are contracts, patents, or other forms, is wrong. Specifically, it is theft.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-exports-crushing-german-solar-...
[2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/last-major-german-solar...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/17/797322305/episode-965-das-gre...
Your comment reads as if there's something wrong with state-sponsored companies but there really aren't and everyone does this including the US and Germany. How they do it might differ but the end result is the same. Directly, tax cuts, giving foreign aid that have strings attached like the US does with almost all its "aid" ("we give you $XXX million and you agree to use it to buy from US defense contractors A, B and C" isn't aid - it is state-sponsoring of companies). It is only seen as a problem in the West when done by a country like PRC and it hurts a company in a country like the US or Germany - never the other way around. I don't know what to call it but it smells like a mix of nationalism and racism.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Peter Altmaier is one of those politicians.
Many, many things were unregulated in the past but ARE regulated today.
If they wanted to maintain a policy of ignoring IP, etc., they they should not have joined the WTO and signed conventions that hold them to obligations.
These organization and conventions set the stage or provide the framework and law by which signatories are bound.
Your argument amounts to: hey, the US and Brazil and the Middle East and many other countries used slave workforces in the past therefore it’s okay for China to do the same today, else they are at a developmental disadvantage.
In any event, I'm quite sure any patent [had the concept existed] would have run out by the time they were adopted elsewhere.
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/deepening-debt-crisis-in-sri-la...
The validity of treaties signed under duress on the other hand I think really deserves some questioning.
Historically, a huge number of treaties have been signed under some degree of duress – most peace treaties are only made when one side is clearly winning, but extracting concessions (however painful) from the losing side is more in the winning side's interests than the risk and expense (in blood and treasure) of continuing the war to a complete military victory.
If one took seriously the idea that treaties signed under duress are invalid, the national borders of Europe and North America (among other places) would have to be very different.
An entire world war was fought as a direct consequence of one said peace treaty. Nazis wouldn't have been able to gather that much support if the Treaty of Versailles hadn't been specifically designed to aggravate the germans.
If torturing you into selling your assets makes the transaction worth questioning, why would we not question it when whole countries do this to each other?
The problem with "questioning transactions" is that if you happen to own any real estate, almost certainly it is land which was stolen from somebody at some point (from indigenous people, or by some invading army, or by some greedy feudal warlord, or whatever). You want to open that can of worms for other people, but do you want to open it for yourself?
So, here's the issue. In other countries, especially over here in South America, this kinds of transactions are heavily frowned upon, and criminal acts resulting in a sale are regularly cited as reasons for voiding some sale or another. This is a bit of a worldview issue, we're not used to thinking about inflicting misery on others as a legit business strategy.
Wherever you are in South America, isn't it the same story? The Europeans (the Spanish or Portuguese or whoever) moved in, stole the land from the indigenous peoples, then divided it up and gave or sold it to European colonists, and it has been on-sold and repeatedly subdivided since – so if land titles founded on theft are invalid, land titles where you are must be just as invalid as those over here.
In Argentina and Chile, mapuche people to this day continue to legally challenge the ownership of land that they claim is theirs even after hundreds of years of having lost it to the genocide of their people -and dozens of others- as part of the creation of our nations.
In Uruguay, where I now live, this is very rarely still the case, mostly because the people who would have a right to challenge those lands ownership were very thoroughly murdered and their descendents have long been stripped of that right.
We're just not ok with brutalizing people as a business strategy. Like I said, it's a cultural thing.
Entering into agreements with another party that doesn't share your values or over whom you have little power or leverage is a restatement of the advice to avoid being unequally yoked.
If folks were foolish enough to assume a sovereign nation was going to do what they think is right or wrong (including following a treaty when there are obviously no real consequences despite it benefiting them to not follow it), then they weren’t paying attention to history.
Chinese companies are also aggressive in marketing stolen technologies but because of incomplete knowledge and expertise, end up in sub-standard/broken products, such as the capacitor electrolyte issues around 10-15 years ago.
I don't support the CCP, but have you heard of the Opium Wars? Literal drug smuggling wars waged by outside countries? Countries literally forcing drugs down Chinese throats...
What they're doing is ugly but it pales in comparison to abuses they've suffered. The only redeeming factor is that those abuses happened a long time ago and China should definitely know better than eye for an eye.
The highly unequal treaties signed between Britain (and other European countries) after the war did not even require China to legalize opium and allow it to be freely imported (that would have been extremely hard to justify politically and the opium trade was not even a primary concern for the British government in the first place). China did legalize opium on their own during the second opium war basically as way to boost tax revenues (because of the Taiping rebellion the Manchu Qing government was near collapse) and Chinese domestic production soon surpassed the imports from British India.
of opium...
This is a bit like that debate about Confederate states fighting for state rights. The right to own slaves.
China didn't want to trade much except for silver and opium. The Chinese trade was emptying British coffers of silver so the British forced trade of one of the few things the Chinese were willing to trade in exchange for their highly sought out goods.
The Manchu Qing government wanted this, many Chinese considered them to be foreign oppressors not much better than the British and the French and were happy to trade with the Europeans (not only for opium).
> of opium...
Again, opium was only a part of it and it was not that important by the second Opium war. China was falling apart due to internal issues and European powers opportunistically used this to peel of parts of China and to expand their overseas markets (for all kinds of goods besides opium) further increasing internal instability.
I’m not trying to exonerate the British or to downplay their imperialist policies but the ‘Opium wars’ were not merely about the opium trade, they weren’t even widely called that until much later. The modern popular perceptions of the wars is highly influenced by Chinnese civil war propaganda (from both sides) which portrays them as beginning of some western plot to destabilize and destroy China while it’s much more complicated than that.
We're not talking about the history and legacy of colonialism. I think that debate has been long settled and traditional colonialism is behind us. The type of colonialism we are now seeing is, for example, infrastructure loans that end up as a backdoor into gaining control of strategic assets in resource-rich but underdeveloped countries, which seems to be the MO of the belt-and-road initiative.
The current human rights abuses like forced sterilization of minorities, body part removal of prisoners or the past abuses of chairman Mao are on a much grander scale of evil where do they fit into your worldview?
I don't see how any of this is relevant anyway. What China is doing today with IP is bad. The opium wars have nothing to do with that.
If you want to go into more unequivocally international affairs abuses, use examples more like the Spratly Islands or the Chinese fishing fleets in international waters.
And regarding IP, I'm kind of torn. China is genuinely developing and innovating and making amazing products for the rest of the world. The UK, the US did the same at the start, also through blatant disregard for IP. Maybe this kind of competition is ok. After all, "If we each trade one apples, at the end we each have one apple. If we each trade one idea, at the end we each have two ideas".
Anyway, we're getting side tracked here.
Only wwtrv addressed by direct point and I can say that I only half-agree with him.
But GekkePrutser's reply is something like the OP saying the tram is going straight, me saying that it's going to the right pointing at a 15 degree angle and then GekkePrutser saying that there is no tram, it's a rocket instead and it's actually pointing down and to the left at a 30 degree angle, i.e., waaaaay off-mark.
Anyway, I'm probably breaking a chunk of HN rules continuing this discussion :-)
Not disputing this but what technologies did Europeans ever steal from China? I’m only aware of tea and silkworms..
But these days I think it's the immaterial cultural/cognitive tools that came from China which tend to be underrated. For example, the Chinese invented the concept of the civil service and examinations, as we think of them today. Meritocratic experts admitted based solely on an anonymous written examination (duplicated by scribes so even the handwriting couldn't given the applicant away). This would influence the British East India Company, which ultimately led to it being implemented in Britain:
> Even as late as ten years after the competitive examination plan was passed, people still attacked it as an "adopted Chinese culture." Alexander Baillie-Cochrane, 1st Baron Lamington insisted that the English "did not know that it was necessary for them to take lessons from the Celestial Empire."[184] In 1875, Archibald Sayce voiced concern over the prevalence of competitive examinations, which he described as "the invasion of this new Chinese culture."
I'm not sure that's patentable, though.
That's a bit of overstatement I think, regarding the civil service I mean. Civil service was known in Babylon, in Egypt and in Roman Empire. From some point Roman Empire also introduced requirements for public servants' education. Not a formalized meritocratic system like in Han China, but we don't have a formalized examination of public servants today either.
Heck of a job brownie!
That said, people living in what is now China likely invented some of the earliest forms of guns, but again it’s fairly ambiguous. Fire Lances for example where used circa 1132CE which didn’t fire projectiles. Mongols used gunpowder bombs delivered via trebuchet in 1274, but again it’s unclear where those bombs where first invented and if cannons where unknown or simply ineffective. All we can say is over these timescales information was flowing in and out of various nations. Possibly because the actual inventors where also moving around.
By 1350 cannons were in common use in Italy and much of Europe, but there is evidence they existed in some form in 1128. Though if they had been effective it was likely they would have seen widespread use much earlier. What’s more clear is many early advancements occurred in Asia and quickly spread.
Did China try to prevent gunpowder or porcelain from being made by outsiders?
"IP" is broader than patents that tend to have an expiry date - but even the expiration periods of patents is determined by the host government and not the appropriator. The US has a lot of classified information that would have long since expired had it been a patent, e.g. 1970's nuclear tech, alloys used in submarines, stealth coating on jets. Porcelain and the other examples gp gave would have fallen under the blanket of "National Security" rather than patents.
The Muslim world acquired the gunpowder formula some time after 1240, but before 1280, by which time Hasan al-Rammah had written, in Arabic, recipes for gunpowder, instructions for the purification of saltpeter, and descriptions of gunpowder incendiaries. Gunpowder arrived in the Middle East, possibly through India, from China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder#Spread_th...
For more information, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions
Insofar as tea involves technique, including selection, cultivation, harvest, processing, and preparation, it's a technology. One that I personally dislike.
It does grow just fine in India which was mostly controlled by Europeans at the time. As much as all of this seems bizarre to you it's still a historical fact. The Chinese government (wanting to maintain its global monopoly) banned the export of tea plants. In the 1840's a British botanist Robert Fortune (commissioned by the East India company) travelled to the tea growing provinces of China, disguised himself as Chinese and illegally smuggled several tea plants back to India. After replicating them in greenhouse he introduced them to the Darjeeling region in Northern India.
To be fair tea was already grown in India before 'the Great Tea Heist' it was just different kinds of tea (e.g. Assam) and Chinese teas were more popular and much more expensive (largely due to Chinese monopoly on trade, western ships were only allowed to trade at specifically designed trade ports).
Also in terms of further back history, wasn’t the recipe behind silk kept as a Chinese secret for years and also foundational for the “silk road”?
And er... china. That stuff you make nice cups and saucers from.
- Chinese noodles and Italian pasta have nothing in common save for the shape of some variants.
- Mixing water, flour and egg yolk isn't exactly a massive qualitative leap from simply having flour around.
- Spice were carried over long distances in the ancient world because of their high value density. Food wasn't. Nobody was shipping around noodles. It's still inefficient enough that all process foods are more or less locally made now.
And finally, I don't understand why you're hypothesizing that Roman pasta would have necessarily been related to Chinese people in Rome. It makes absolutely no sense.
While Chinese noodles may be made of rice or wheat flour and Italian pasta is made of wheat flour, the noodles, regardless of what material they're made of, are indeed made in more or less the same way. And indeed, as you have left it, insisting they have nothing in common does not change that it's entirely unsupportable. That the earliest evidence of Italian pasta around the 4th century BC postdates the earliest evidence of China trading with the West, which predates Rome's founding, it is clear when taken in context of the earliest evidence of Chinese noodles around the 4th millennium BC that the recipe for noodles migrated to the West. While it is possible some intrepid Roman chef independently divined the magical process of inducing noodles from wheat flour coincidentally right around the time of the earliest evidence of Chinese trade with the West, it is slightly more complicated than the recipe, a staple of Chinese cuisine for maybe 3500 years by then, being passed along with silk, tea and ivory by traders.
I am completely flummoxed that you can't seem to grasp this, that not only did Romans not invent pasta, they could not possibly have ever made or even tasted pasta sauce, as Christopher Columbus hadn't yet been born when the last Roman died, nor could he have invented the tomato before 1492. Italy basically imported everything, invented nothing, even the Romans themselves were imported and stole most of the innovations attributed to them from the Etruscans, themselves having migrated from S. Turkey, and who the Romans pretty much wiped out within a few hundred years. Italians like to trace their roots in a flattering way because Rome happens to be there, but I don't think there were any Italians before 1946.
> they could not possibly have ever made or even tasted pasta sauce, as Christopher Columbus hadn't yet been born when the last Roman died, nor could he have invented the tomato before 1492
You seem to have a penchant for continuously shifting goalposts. What does sauce to have with this?
I never said it was. It's just that by then, it had already been known in Europe. So it certainly wasn't an import from China.
> American-Chinese cuisine was invented by Chinese in America, and I doubt any Romans tasted it, ancient or otherwise, but it is possible there was some Ancient Roman analog
What do these two things have to do with each other? Why are you mixing Roman pasta and Chinese cuisine? I merely juxtaposed them in a list of claims, beyond that they have nothing in common.
Piracy is definitely a theft. It’s ludicrous to suggest that IP doesn’t have any value like physical property.
I am not against IP as such, but violation of a legally guaranteed monopoly, even though it causes some loss of capturable value, isn't the same as theft/larceny.
Words have meanings and we should respect them. Piracy is legally similar to a non-organized blacksmith setting up shop in a city where every blacksmith must be member of a certain guild to work. This kind of monopoly was routinely granted before by either the Sovereign or particular cities.
Isn't ownership a government-granted privilege as well then?
So if piracy is simply the act of ignoring sovereign privilege in open water (sea, space, internet), then I think the only contention one could make that piracy != theft is by asserting that piracy is not only theft.
To be clear, I make some money on my IP (being a self-published author who sells his books) and I encountered people pirating scanned copies of my work. I do not mind on this scale, but I am aware that if someone just started publishing my books commercially and I had no copyright to protect me, I would be in trouble.
But it still wouldn't be theft, rather a foul kind of "competition". My physical books wouldn't disappear from my (rented) garage and readers who like me would still hopefully buy them directly on my e-shop.
And it's strange, in that you could become relevant and have your audience expanded by the infringers hand.
Question there is how to benefit from that...
Information that requires investment to gain is considered valuable. This argument is basically "any job that isn't physical manufacturing should not be paid, since the ideas only spread instead of move."
Oh you spent $500m developing a novel cognitive treatment for ptsd and proving it works better than sota? Humanity thanks you! Enjoy your total loss."
Oh you wrote a book? Hopefully it wasn't a book on business building, since you'll be earning nothing for your effort.
Oh you're a consultant? How charitable of you!
There's a large amount of misinformation and people lacking an understanding on the differences between copyright, patents and trademarks. Making these threads repetitive to read. Always such a pointless anecdotes such as yours, truncating all IP systems under "IP laws".
For example. The patent system came to existence to ensure that inventions were not hidden, but published to the public in a form patent. Instead of the inventor hiding the invention, the society grants the inventor sole rights to the invention thanks to them making it public.
Copyright and Trademark are different beasts to Patents, and all these are very linked to the laws of single countries, bar signed treaties. Please distinguish what you are talking about. Otherwise your point is moot.
One wonders if the HN readers denying the concept of IP also support copying GPL code without adherence to the GPL. It would be logically consistent.
And yet taking a snap of a museum artifact still is quite distinct from stealing someones pen.
Fraud vs. theft vs. copyright violation vs. insider trading etc. are all different categories of illegal activity and we shouldn't mix them up by using their names interchangeably.
I admit that as a maths major, I tend to be pedantic about definitions, at least in things as serious as crime.
There is a moral dimension as well. I do not believe that we should cut punishments for theft in half. But I do believe we could well cut copyright protection periods back to the levels where they were in 1960 without causing any major problems or undue hardship to anyone.
Possession exists in a physical sense, but ownership does not.
No. It’s legally similar to a blacksmith copying another blacksmith’s designs and putting his trademark mark on their products. IP laws do not inherently restrict anyone from freely practicing their trade nor do they force you to join any trade/industry associations.
While true, it's a gray area when you get into certain industries. Cell phones, for example, are chock-full of cross licensed patents regarding the baseband chips and radio waves. There's a term in the industry for these kinds of patents (my mind is blanking). Ignoring the necessary industry talent, there's no way in hell one can make a new baseband processor without dozens of NDAs and patents that you yourself can offer up as leverage.
IMHO (and one many here share), IP laws (with regard to software) have gone way too far. The big problem is that the companies with the might to enact change tend to be part of the problem themselves.
I agree that many patents are held by groups that don't use them how we'd like them to, but they still had to _buy_ the patent. Society promised them that the patent would be enforced and it is. Combating abuse of the courts is a separate matter.
You spend twenty years designing the perfect steel production method, spending millions of dollars, and start selling it as Pessimizer Steel. It's obviously superior. You start making some of your money back. I spend an hour watching you through the window and start selling it as Super Steel and claiming that it's just as good because I made it the same way. I sell it at half price because I'm not paying off any business loans. You go bankrupt.
That's the system you want? Who is going to invest in steel research in that system?
You can make an argument for trademark law on the basis of sunk costs to develop an intangible brand with intrinsic value, as opposed to as a consumer protection mechanism, but this isn't that.
In one case, you forbid everyone but the licensees to produce a certain type of nails. In another case, you forbid everyone but the guild members to produce nails at all.
Both are government-granted monopolies.
For a claim of theft to be made, someone, somewhere, somehow must be denied property of some kind.
Piracy is infringement, and we have that word because the hard fact is nobody, anywhere, anyhow is denied property.
There is value, and all that, but it's not theft, and it's not simple.
In the case of say movie piracy, or music, some entertainment work, infringement can actually add value back to the creator by making that creator relevant and with that relevancy, a potential buyer of works. Bob likes a band, shares a track with Joe, who likes it and buys an album they would not have otherwise purchased if it were not for Bob...
In the case of a technology, someone learns how to do something other people would rather they not know. No party is denied understanding or property, unless one wants to talk about a physical instance of the understanding, but that's a side show really. The value is in the info, not the piece of paper detailing it, but I digress too.
Here's the interesting thing:
Once more parties have that understanding, and despite originators preferring they not have that understanding, all parties can gain from new understanding that always happens on top of existing understanding, and in the end?
That's how we advance.
Question is what is worth what?
It's not one of theft, but infringement and of what makes sense in economic terms as well as our overall development as beings.
All wealth is the product of labor. Intellectual labor is labor, and the understanding it brings is wealth, but that inherently leaks out into the body of people, eventually becoming common knowledge, or at a minimum well known, or documented. Some secrets do die with their originators too, but that's more rare.
I changed careers watching those MBA's tear great companies apart, and the example close to home for me was Tektronix. There is a video out there "Spirit of Tek" that kind of gets at the powerful innovation culture once practiced there. In that culture, Joe Bloomstone can walk off the street, get training and advance into product design and even spin off into a company backed by Tek!
It happened a lot and the area was rich with technical understanding, manufacturing, all the good stuff.
Then it got sent over there...
Today, people want it back, many people are taking hard won skills to their graves, leaving current people to climb back to regain what was sold off for a little money in the now, leaving the region doing hair, nails, tires...
The people who can make stuff matter. Physical things matter.
Agreed.
Two wrongs make a right..
The point is it's typical of China to steal IP. It's a problem because it gives Chinese companies an unfair advantage as they grow big by stealing all they want from others, but have their own IP protected in other countries.
It would be nice to live in a world without patents, but that's not the world we live in. So if you're ok ignoring reality, might as well go on a tirade how stealing cash is "not immoral" because you don't believe in government issued tender or something.
China has done this to perfection in the real world.
Stealing a tech was a massive diplomatic blow in Civilization. The US just shrugged (because the rich made a huge amount of money and increase of relative wealth status by acquiring a massive slave labor force in China rather than deal with the uppity American middle class).
I just did a light google pass to see if any international relations academics have done anything with Sid Meier's Civ and various other types of games. I expected them to not, because of course academics are STILL "ew, computers" and even worse, it's gauche mass market entertainment.
But the abstraction is, I would argue, more detailed than a lot of academic analyses which are largely bloviation, the game theory quantifiable and measurable, and reduces a lot of complexity that normally would be hard for a garden variety person (aka a gamer) to wrap their head around.
Civ always tried dropping historical tidbits and education into it, but arguably its most potent contribution is simply the more honest treatment of history: civilizations rising and falling, fighting over resources, getting conquered, and getting destroyed, and the roles of economic strength, military strength, and tradeoffs.
It's not like anyone is denied property here. The conflict boils down to people doing things other people don't like / want them to do.
Once humans know how to do something, they know. It will spread, eventually becoming common knowledge.
Infringement is the right term here, and it's all about that spread, the timing, etc...
The US invented this practice, we didn't respect the IP of other countries until we started generating significant amounts of our own. China even stole this idea!