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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

And so what???

The US pried the textile and locomotives industries from the UK, check the history of Samuel Slater[1]. Same happened for Japan under Meiji restoration. India and Brazil do the same for pharmaceutical patents, because they're too poor to afford paying them.

Stealing IP will happen, no matter what treaties and governments try to do. For poor countries it is a path they just don't have the luxury of giving up.

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

Edit: over-patriotic Americans seem to think this is just about them and call my argument whataboutism. It isn't both. I am stressing the fact that protectionism and stealing IP is a path almost every industrialized nation took. Even the UK did protectionism against India textiles to help their beginning textile industry.

The industrialized countries are trying to close the gates they used to get into their rich garden. My point is that right or wrong, moral or not, it simply won't work.

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> Stealing IP will happen, no matter what treaties and governments try to do. For poor countries it is a path they just don't have the luxury of giving up.

I feel like this misses the point. I don't expect people to complain much about IP being stolen by competitors - that feels like an security/internal problem.

The issue with China seems to be that they force partnerships with Chinese companies, resulting in western companies having to share their IP, and when that IP is used outside of the constraints of whatever contract was created and the western company complains, the Chinese government colludes with the Chinese company to stymie or exploit the western company as much as can be done without breaking the relationship.

I'm also not going to say whether this is right or wrong - just that the feeling I get from the whole thing (as someone who doesn't follow this stuff that closely) is that the government efforts go beyond what others have done in the past (which I understand to be more subsidizing industries to boot them up).

Can't the companies just not do business in China if they don't like the contract? Other countries have similar laws, like it forces companies to hire local people or spend part of the money locally.

If China can afford to not respect the IP laws then there is nothing what a company can do, eventually the secrets would be reversed engineered.

They do. This is part of why we have such a large trade deficit with China.

The real issue here is China's double-talk on trade. They talk about open free trade but in reality they practice intense nationalistic and protectionist trade tactics. They do everything possible to prevent foreign companies from selling anything in China, while at the same time doing everything they can to attract foreign labor outsourcing, capital, and of course IP.

I can't blame them too much. These kinds of trade policies are how nations build strong domestic economies. The US did the same thing during its industrialization phase. Nevertheless it's horrible for American workers and the American middle class.

It's literally the only thing I agree with Trump about -- that China needs to be taken to task for its extremely aggressive trade policies.

Might makes right, and you can only take someone to task if you have the power to do so. The US (or at least owners of equity in the US) are too dependent on the cheap labor and lax environmental rules of China, otherwise there is no reason for the most powerful country in the world to let another country take "advantage" of them.

China is equally dependent on foreign infusions of capital. The real issue I think is that labor arbitrage has been very good for upper income and wealthy Americans. Corporations and the rich have gotten much richer by shipping labor off to China and paying less for it and pocketing the difference. That's largely why there has been no political will to challenge this situation.

I find it funny that it's also the previous generations' middle class' 401(k)s and pensions that need the investment returns provided by cheap chinese labor and lax environmental rules, while at the same time ruining the future for their descendants.

To me, the lack of political will to change has been akin to the local business owner being afraid to tell the local mafia boss he no longer needs protection.

Technology has stretched scarcity-based economics to the kind of breaking point where we complain when we get the iPhones and they get the sweatshops.

Have you considered maybe American companies simply aren't competitive enough compared to the local players. American products are often too expensive because the companies want high dollar profits to show their shareholders, even if the cost of production, which is often outsourced, doesn't justify the high market price.

Also, as time goes on the skills of the entire world population is being equalized. That is to say, the skilled labor market is becoming global. When that happens American workers and middle class simply can't keep enjoying the high wages that are currently prevalent.

Unless of course, you want to start a new era of imperialism and force developing economies to confine themselves to the lower end of the value chain.

You can. However 1 billion potential customers are dangerous to ignore. It isn't just that they don't buy from you, it is that they buy from your competition - which can include a brand new company they start locally - which gives your competition enough cash to design their next version better than yours.

Its not dangerous to ignore if it results in your entire IP portfolio getting expropriated and used to crush you.

Its a siren song that is enabled by increased quarterly profits, even knowing full well the risks, it will be another CEO and board before they come home to roost.

It is a double edge sword for sure.

That's so called exchange the technology by the market. If you are in the condition of China, what will you do to avoid yourself always stay in the lower level manufacture status? Imagine that's you as a human being, are you willing to always do the low pay labor work, or learning the knowledge and experience from your colleague secretly as they not willing to share with you, then try to position yourself a better career path?

The US pried the textile and locomotives industries from the UK

This is the sort of argument that an eight-year-old makes to his mother, and the mother responds, "If Jimmy jumped off a bridge, would you?"

I don't know if you're an American or not, but there's an very common expression: Two wrongs don't make a right.

Isn't this "whataboutism"? You shut down a conversation by trying to deflect about how others have also done something?

Like you said, two wrongs don't make a right. Just by pointing out this has happened elsewhere doesn't make the conversation about China doing it any less important or relevant. Why shut down this conversation?

To call what we call “IP infringement” as wrong presumes IP monopolies are right, and that there’s no objective reason why it’s so .

In the US patent law doesn’t cover everything, there are alternate forms of IP like copyright which has let open source software and fashion thrive.

Then there’s the open hardware system in China called GongKai: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141230/09362929550/how-g...

All right, but if China has signed international IP agreements, it is reasonable to expect them to keep their word.

[See my other comment for how to interpret "expect", though...]

Or is it perspective?

There's two parts here. Yes, China's doing it, and we shouldn't ignore it, and we need to condemn it and figure out how to respond. That's on one level.

On another level, though, any country that has more to gain by stealing than to lose by being stolen from is going to be tempted to steal. Given what human nature is, you'd better expect it to happen.

It's like how in domestic society, on one level we expect people to obey the law. But on another level we expect at least some people not to, which is why we have police.

I forget, what was this thread about again? Human nature or China stealing IP?

"whataboutism" is a term employed by hypocrites who don't have a real counter-argument.

In what way does this fact "shutdown the conversation"?

Except that this is not jumping from a bridge, it is the tried and tested way to develop a nation's industry. Moreover, it is very funny hearing this coming from Americans who are in one side accepting that this is wrong and then in the same breath denouncing it being done to themselves!

There's no contradiction; the standards in the 1800s were much lower across the globe. These standards are no longer acceptible today.

By whose standard? It’s awfully convenient for the United States to reap the benefits of “lower standards” and then shut the gates after they no longer need those lower standards.

Would you consider slavery acceptable in developing nations? After all, the US benefited from it while it was growing, why should we deny the economic benefits of slavery to other countries.

If the offer on the table for developing countries is either take the poison pill or never develop (where the poison pill is lax IP, lax environmental laws, child labor, exploiting other countries for resources), I think you'd be hard pressed to find a country which wouldn't make that sacrifice.

That's not the offer on the table. China is already a developed country (and they already got there by more than their share of exploitation).

Depends how you define "developed country". The world bank seems to consider GDP as the main factor, if you disagree with the common metric then you'll have to define how you see it.

China has a lot of wealth on display but overall isn't so well developed if you remember the fact that so many people live there. If China were as developed as the US, we would expect it to be something like 3x the economic activity as the US.

GDP per capita:

USA: 57k

Canada: 42k

UK: 39k

...

Kazakhstan: 8k

China: 8k

Libya: 7k

In addition by some metrics, it could be exploiting even harder to achieve further industrialization. For instance, China is way behind the US in CO2 emissions per capita even today, and if you count total CO2 emissions, the US is still #1. If China had equal CO2 emissions as the US per capita (which might indicate a similar level of industrialization), that would be disastrous.

https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc...

Global standards have improved since the 1800s. Lots of countries condemn things they once practiced. Slavery, genocide, pollution, and colonialism are all things that most prominent countries have participated in to some extent but now rightly condemn. This is the basic recipe for progress and it's a good thing.

Actually, the funny part is the Chinese crying about unfairness.

It helped the US become an industrialist behemoth, and as such I’d say it also helped the rest of the world (having more industrialized nations compared to fewer was a plus for human development, in the great scheme of things). As such I’d say that the eight-year old would be right.

It also happened over a hundred years ago. We are now in the 'modern era' and international trade is a much bigger part of any economy. The World Bank statistics only go back to 1960, but since that time the % of economy that is trade has gone from 25% to 50%. Much more significant to steal technology today. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS

I’d say international trade was a bigger part of the world’s GDP back in the late Antiquity- going well into the Middle Ages, that is back when most of the know-how migrated from East to West (from water mills to the silk industry, gun powder etc). I think the world was a better place because the Europeans got to “steal” that know-how, I’m saying the world will be a better place if the Chinese (or the Indians) get to “steal” today’s latest know-how. Of course, if you’re a US citizen whose pension money was invested in US companies and their IP assets then I agree, the situation is less than ideal, but in the great scheme of things and for humanity as a whole I think that the pluses are bigger than the local minuses, so to speak.

I don't think they're saying that it's OK, just that IP theft is inevitable until China becomes rich enough to care about protecting their own IP. You can't judge a country for doing what any other country would do if they were poorer.

> This is the sort of argument that an eight-year-old makes to his mother, and the mother responds, "If Jimmy jumped off a bridge, would you?"

Of course?

This is one of the stupidest question in the world; I don't understand how parents worldwide are still repeating it.

Randall Munroe explains it best: https://xkcd.com/1170/.

Munroe redefines it to make it less stupid, but it's still stupid. Which is more likely, that you somehow are missing an entire bridge on fire or collapsing while on it, or that they are being dumb? Mass suicides are not, in fact, unheard of. In the case of 'if Jimmy jumped off a bridge, would you', it's even dumber because Jimmy is jumping off a bridge all the time - to commit suicide. The Golden Gate Bridge alone has had around 1600 suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicides_at_the_Golden_Gate_Br...), >20 annually, net of all the safety measures & attempts to talk people down; as far as I am aware, 0 of them were jumping to escape a fire or serious problem, and if they were, at a fatality rate of >98%, it's difficult to think of a real event on the Golden Gate where jumping was better than not jumping. A similar observation obtains for... quite a lot of bridges. (Humans aren't good at falling.)

It's more like "192 wrongs make an international norm" than "2 wrongs make a right".

https://xkcd.com/1170/

Indeed, "Ad hominem tu quoque"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

See whataboutism

Now there's an hypocrisy to complain about a rule when you broke it prior.

The fact that we did it to the UK doesn't mean it's good for us to let China do it too. I mean, we exterminated the native Americans and stole their land--if someone tried to do that to us, should we sit back and do nothing? "Oh well, cosmic balance and whatnot!"

It’s definitely in American interests to defend IP, but I wouldn’t try to make moralistic arguments, they just come off as hypocritical given the history.

And also given how IP is abused these days much more than it was in the past, which weakens moral arguments in its favour.

The thing is, you can always dig up some hypocrisy if you go back far enough. Our ancestors doing something bad doesn't forever nullify arguments against other people doing that thing to us. You don't deserve karmic retribution because of what someone else did, even if you benefit from it.

I would discount the validity of advice to stay away from performance enhancing drugs from someone who uses them. I mean they're right, but I don't feel... inspired to do so.

There are other ways to convince people, like appealing to their interests or punishing with retribution.

Frankly, the UK screwed up by not getting into a trade war to protect their IP. They had their chance and blew it.

I mean, regardless of whether we should expect a country to engage in this behavior or whether or not it is right, it’s worth noting that this is an area to plan around in trade agreements and concessions. Despite contracts with the companies in question, the IP was used for whatever purposes the Chinese government wanted.

So it’s worth noting that, as a western company, you cannot trust these agreements, whether or not the actions of the Chinese are justified. You should assume that any restrictions you negotiated are worthless, and if you want access to the Chinese market the price implicitly includes any IP the local partner can take.

That’s what I see as the takeaway.

I went to the Toyota factory in Japan and they talked about how they got started by importing Chrysler vehicles from the United States, taking them apart, and basically copying them to make the first Toyota cars.

But over the years they started developing in-house knowledge, and their own innovations.

Now Toyota is known for making reliable cars that are affordable. Is the world better off with Toyota making cars? I think so. But is Chrysler worse off? I also think so. So it’s a tough one. But at the same time I like the philosophy of software startups regarding ideas: sure, take these ideas for free, it’s all in the execution.

If Chrysler is worse off, that's its own damn fault. Anyone watching the management of American auto companies over the past 30 years can't be but gob smacked about how incompetent it has been.

Morality in business is a fool’s errand. Just that it puts recent actions into context: if stealing IP is amoral, then so are trade sanctions and other kinds of economic warfare. In the end, it’s only about our relationship, just like it was between the USA and the UK in the 1800s.

And this is bad for the future of citizens and corporations of the US, especially if it continues, because Chinese firms will use this to compete vigorously with the US firms that spent the time and money developed the tech. Much of the WSJ's readership has a vested interest in that not coming to pass. That's "so what".

In some ways, you can't blame China for trying. It's playing dirty, but that's how international relations go.

You can place a bit more blame on the US companies that let it happen. The people running them are short-sighted and unpatriotic.

The real problem is that the law allows companies to be in a race to the bottom that is ultimately self-destructive. Allowing non-citizens to get access to the IP should be illegal. If it were, then bringing that IP to a location controlled by China's contradictory law would be a violation.

You can't fully stop spies, but you sure can make it illegal to simply hand things over without a fight.

Samuel Slater is a fine example. He was a spy. He broke the law. The USA would have gotten the technology years earlier if the UK had simply handed it over. Picture that: the USA demands that textile factories be built in the USA, as joint partnerships with technology transfer. The UK wasn't that stupid.

> You can place a bit more blame on the US companies that let it happen.

This is one aspect of Chinese culture that I’ll never understand. For example, if you get cheated, it’s your fault for being lax/trusting/stupid enough to get cheated. The immorality is on the victim, which makes for some extremely paranoid business relationships when working in China.

How is that beneficial in the long term? Why doesn’t such a system just implode on itself? I guess this is where guanxi comes into play to counteract that, because I don’t see how it could work otherwise.

> The immorality is on the victim,

Does Chinese culture actually shift moral blame onto the victim? If not, then this sounds a bit like the "victim blaming" obsession of modern American culture, which misses the crucial point - there are two types of blame to be passed around here. The offender was evil - they cheated. The victim was stupid - they were aware of the danger and ignored it.

Its more like just by simply doing business in China the victim should have been aware of the danger. There is no negative karma for doing scams, cheating, or stealing IP, only for being scammed, cheated, or having IP stolen.

It isn't really victim blaming, more like your business partner comes back to you and says "Why did you let me cheat you? This is all your fault."

I've never heard of a "victim blaming" obsession of modern American culture, despite having grown up in it. Could you point me to some articles that elaborate?

At least in the US, you have to be cheated a second time for it to be your fault.

Ya, in China the saying goes "trick me once, shame on me."

The question of whether it is right or wrong is separate from the question of what we should do about it. The question we should worry about is whether it is in our best interest to turn the other cheek or to fight back.

In turn, we ought to acknowledge both the possibility that fighting back might hurt more than it helps and the possibility that we've been shooting ourselves in the foot by turning the other cheek.

I have seen tons of comments like this lately on HN. I believe personally patents should he entirely abolished, but if we are keeping them at this point it is a major disadvantage to have it stolen by the Chinese. I am shocked people on HN are so much more offended by Facebook or Google's minor misdeeds while outright theft by nation states is ongoing. I believe lots of these comments are placed here by PR companies paid by Russia and China.

That sounds like Trump speak. He also believes a lot of things without any proof.

This is textbook whataboutism. Samuel slater shouldn't have done that, and neither should China.

Even when they have more billionaires than the US? And who's doing the spying - some poor factory worker?

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