Why is that? Cost of labor? Looser regulatory requirements?

He’s telling you that they violate IP law extensively in products that don’t leave the country. It’s a lot cheaper to mass produce cheap WiFi chips when you can do it with stolen IP.

IP is defined by RFCs, not law.

(damn, the imaginary property maximalists really came out of the woodwork on this thread)

They have a very different view of IP than the west. Sharing is the norm.

Does that work for other things? Can I just say “I had a different view of that” and get away with whatever it was?

For many people, information and physical items are completely different entities. When you steal bottle of milk, the original owner loses access to it. When you copy information without permission, the original owner keeps the access to it. So they have completely different attitude to those two behaviours.

> For many people, information and physical items are completely different entities. When you steal bottle of milk, the original owner loses access to it. When you copy information without permission, the original owner keeps the access to it.

Relevant:

Copying Is Not Theft

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

  Copying is not theft.
  Stealing a thing leaves one less left
  Copying it makes one thing more;
  that’s what copying’s for.
  
  Copying is not theft.
  If I copy yours you have it too
  One for me and one for you
  That’s what copies can do
  
  If I steal your bicycle
  you have to take the bus,
  but if I just copy it
  there’s one for each of us!
  
  Making more of a thing,
  that is what we call “copying”
  Sharing ideas with everyone
  That’s why copying
  is
  FUN!

So what I can walk into any store and walk out with a cart full and not pay and it's all good, sharing is the norm? I can just walk into any apartment complex and move into any unit without pay since sharing is the norm?

Well, those things aren't IP. Maybe you could take pictures of all the pages in a book in a bookstore?

So only intellectual property is shared? Doesn't sound to me like sharing is the norm when it only applies to one category of goods.

Try reading my comment fully again? I was talking about IP.

No, that's not what anyone said. The conversation is about copyright...

So it's not that "sharing is the norm" it's a difference in the understanding of ownership and property rights. Otherwise why not share the food and share the housing, since sharing is the norm and not the exception when it comes to property rights?

Otherwise why is sharing the norm in one small specific instance and not the rest?

The original statement was in the context of IP. In this case, no one has anything taken away when it is shared. Sharing physical goods requires them to be taken from somewhere/someone... not so much for digital information, which can be duplicated infinitely.

This is a funny comment in the context of a discussion about a (nominally) communist country.

Read this if you don't believe me: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2014/from-gongkai-to-open...

"sharing is the norm" means publishing.

Taking is the norm.

Which is super weird, because Xioami isn’t “sharing” their proprietary OS with any other phone manufacturers.

CATL isn’t “sharing” any of their battery IP with competitors. They consider it trade secret and will actively pursue recourse inside or out of China.

What is apparent is they use cultural misunderstanding to justify stealing IP, even though they actively try to protect their own inside and outside of the country.

https://www.ess-news.com/2024/10/28/calb-sues-catl-over-pate...

It's normal. IIRC Early America didn't have Copyright or other protections, they were added later once it was making its own works and had skin in the game.

So now that China has skin in the game, will they very soon stop stealing IP by your logic?

Copyright and patents have been a part of the US since before day one. It's in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution and was even part of the Articles of Confederation.

Patents were established even before Columbus.

What about it is normal? "Early America" allowed copyright infringement on American soil as long as the IP was stolen from foreign nations, but simultaneously enforced IP nationally and internationally on any claims made by a US company?

Do you have some examples of this? Because I hear it parroted a lot and yet the only thing people can point to is "but the US stole some designs from Brittain on some early machines" - which is not at all what we're talking about here, and was at nowhere near the scale of China's theft.

You probably heard references to Samuel Slater. He memorized the plans for British textile equipment and brought them to the US. He violated British law, but US law did not mind.

Then there is Eli Whitney, to give an example of an American who enjoyed US patent protection. He patented his cotton gin.

You would want to ask a historian for other examples.

I don't think they actually do. They're not dumb or crazy. What I think sets Chinese companies apart from Western counterparts is their aptitude for making money through selling physical things. Everyone else drove off to casinos and they're the last ones in the factory dirtying hands.

As someone growing up in Soviet Union, sharing was the norm for us as well until we were in this s**t together and nobody had any chance to earn much from it anyway. This changed quite fast in nineties though.