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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!

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

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.

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

> 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.)

See whataboutism

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

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...]

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"?

Or is it perspective?

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