From Gongkai to Open Source (2014)

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=gongkai

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4018

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=147 (I've been there. It's overwhelming.)

This is, however, a natural outcome of the Shanzhai culture. For the life of me I cannot find it now, but there is a fascinating article (by a well-known sci-fi author, I think... William Gibson? Neal Stephenson?) about Shanzhai, aspects of which TFA alludes to. It gives very good insights into the pros and cons of the culture of sharing that underlies today's Chinese tech industry. While one of the pros was the dizzying array of remixes it produces, one of the cons was that it essentially removes the incentive to invest in expensive R&D. While China is very good at the former, the West is still where the latter happens, and I tend to attribute this to the different cultural attitudes regarding IP.

Regarding the references to fair use and reverse engineering, there may be a lot of FUD out there and TFA helps in dispelling some of that, but there is no shortage of reversing in industry today. Companies regularly reverse their competitors' products, either to ferret out technical secrets or to detect infringement of their own IP. IANAL, but with few exceptions (like those clauses in the DMCA regarding DRM-related mechanisms), IP laws do not forbid prevent reverse engineering per se. Generally it's only when you leverage the knowledge gained from reversing in a commercial product that you can get into trouble.

Look at what Tencent did with QQ and WeChat, the kind of feature experiment they run on a monthly basis alone is mind boggling.

Look at what Kuaidi and Didi did to work WITH the taxi industry and be profitable, instead of fighting against the taxi industry head on like Uber is trying to do.

These kind of "soft" innovations are just as important as "hard" innovations such as a new processor design. In fact these kind of innovations are more interesting to me because they are very often not predictable and nobody has a solid "roadmap for business model", unless hard, tech roadmaps.

Right. That's the problem. He wants to steal someone else's technology and resell it. What he means by "innovate" is "add some tiny feature to someone else's thing."

Start your company in China, fine. You'll move to a western country eventually, if you get big enough, and China doesn't reform. You simply can't trust a society where the laws don't apply equally. There isn't an Apple, Google, or Microsoft coming out of China. Instead, you get Ali Baba and Weibo that clone American startups.

I won't consider China a threat to American innovation until they get a true rule of law, democracy, and intellectual property rights. This is a tall order that won't be fulfilled anytime soon.