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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

> To see all this being stolen by someone who just walked in, pretending to make a deal, is so painful.

I mean, if you want to talk about pain, a lot of Chinese people see Japan primarily as the country responsible for the Rape of Nanking [0], among other atrocities. It doesn't make IP theft justified, but it probably puts it into context for why the Chinese government, people, or companies would have very little compunction against doing it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre

EDIT - wow, people here really hate China. Is it so hard to see human factors affecting behaviors?

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Oh come on. Chinese are known for stealing IP from everyone including other Chinese. They consider this an achievment.

They would have stolen the tech from anyone else, Japanese or not.

Yeah. Just googling about Alibaba in Chinese and one would find articles about the IP theft culture within the organisation. There are tons of stories circulating in Chinese start-up communities about how project managers from Alibaba, Tencent, etc, pretended to be interested in funding (or collaborating with) a start-up before stealing ideas/designs/code/algorithms from them.

e.g. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/29783732

Edit: elaboration

That strategy is not uncommon for big companies, think about Facebook, Microsoft.

I guess at least they don't pretend to be interested in funding or collaborating with another company before stealing, say, design/code/algorithms from them. Or are there any anecdotes about these big conglomerates doing disgraceful things like that as well?

From talking to friends, I can think of 3 examples from MSFT, GOOG, and AMZN right off the bat. Capitalism is dog eat dog by nature IMO.

But most of the atrocities in china in the 20th century were committed by the chinese against other chinese? And most of the atrocities in the 19th century were by european imperialists. Also, everyone committed atrocities against everyone else. Using your logic, we should all be stealing from each other since it is all justified because of historical wrongs. Sure you can't be arguing that?

> Sure you can't be arguing that?

You're right, I wasn't.

No, it doesn't. China steals everything worth stealing from anyone that has it.

Censorship is bad. Free exchange of information is good. Unless we're talking about IP, then suddenly the opposite is true.

Really, when you get under all the BS from people who've been propagandized against China, they believe America should win and China should lose. Of course China isn't going to agree to this, and they're big enough that they don't have to. Might makes right, until China becomes the mightiest global economic power.

Not only that, the political rhetoric just massively overstates reality.

From PIIE [1],

> Overlooked are the data that suggest the popular narrative exaggerates the magnitude of China's forced technology transfer and theft and does not allow for the possibility that China's protection of intellectual property is improving rather than worsening. […] Since the subsidiaries of these holding companies using the licensed foreign technology are located in other jurisdictions worldwide, China probably ranks second globally in the magnitude of licensing fees paid for technology used within national borders.

From MMC's Brink [2]

> In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Western firms such as Apple and Intel made large profits by investing in China to take advantage of the cheap labor, often at terrific human cost. As China’s economy grew and the population became wealthier, Western firms were then able to profit by selling their products back to the wealthier children of the same labor force that made them. The Chinese government saw this happening and wanted Western firms benefiting from the Chinese market to give something back. It established a system of approving foreign investments on the condition that the businesses involved agreed to partner with local firms and transfer knowledge and skills to the local Chinese market.

and [3]

> …Paul Goldstein, an IP expert at Stanford. Instead, it’s given away in negotiations with Chinese businesses, officials and investors.

[1] https://piie.com/blogs/china-economic-watch/china-forced-tec... [2] https://www.brinknews.com/why-china-is-a-leader-in-intellect... [3] https://www.brinknews.com/how-much-american-ip-is-china-stea...

> Censorship is bad. Free exchange of information is good. Unless we're talking about IP, then suddenly the opposite is true.

Alright, let's torture your false equivalence a little more: you shouldn't have privacy because that's prevention of the free exchange of information.

How is it false equivalency? This has nothing to do with the concept of sanctuary.

Even Adam Smith regarded IP laws to be an 'Unessecary Evil'. Even in SV, an engineer works for one company, learns the tricks of the trade, and then takes that knowledge to another. This is business as usual, and it's a critical ingredient to Silicon Valley's success, and it's the secret to the success of many city states and industrial hubs all throughout history.

Not some defender of IP here but it doesn't seem equivalent. Guy transferring companies takes domain knowledge with them, they don't take the blueprints to project X with them.

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