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Comment by Edmond | Hacker News Reader

IP theft is an important part of the Chinese "Miracle" but it is short-sighted to focus too much on that...If IP access is all it took, I think we would have seen the Chinese achievement replicated in many other places.

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Exactly. You need process knowledge in addition to IP in order to make innovation and manufacturing happen. And China is really good at cultivating process knowledge, something the US is slowly ceding to them.

Transferring process knowledge is why, until very recently (Tesla, others?), all companies have been required to minority partner with a Chinese company in China and thus transfer their process knowledge along with IP.

China abandoned that requirement initially few months after Trump's trade war.

But things got escalated.

The reality is that often, neither the patents or the processes are available for licensing or through an acquisition and merger. Trade secrets and IP are used adversarialy, to limit competition and often times governments are deeply involved, vetoing against any technology transfer that could hurt national competitiveness. That makes sense for a nation but hurts the technological progress of the world.

So we are in effect, back to the pre-intelectual-property world. The moral connotations of IP theft hardly apply.

Japan’s KHI licensed their technology to China’s CSR. Japan was never going to have the Chinese market to itself because it has competition: in addition to indigenous competitors Europe was competing for contracts as well. The dispute was over CSR’s redevelopment of licensed technology and attempts at export of the new package overseas. As it turns out there is not much of a market for HSR outside of China, Japan and Europe after all. Still it is weird to keep on calling licensed technology “theft”, when blueprints were actually sold. It’s also weird to have this fetish of how superior Japanese technology is (so China must have stolen theirs from Japan) while ignoring evidence to the contrary as revealed by the recent Taiwan rail disaster.

Most countries don’t have the military or self-sufficient economics of China though.

French Polynesia could probably never do this kind of thing to Japan for example.

What do you mean? Can NATO or US force any law they want? If I am in a small country and decide that patents and copyright is evil should I expect a war? If not what do you mean by military in your comment?

As I see it if you don't like China politics don't do business with them and do not involve the army(though we all know some big countries like to get involved in smaller countries politics and force laws).

Most smaller countries get subsidies from bigger ones. As the ruler of a small country, if you don’t play ball, those subsidies will go away, you’ll be blackballed, you won’t get those prestigious official visits that can boost your local popularity, you won’t get preferential treatment or inclusion in free-trade agreements, your citizens will have to pay for tourist visas, your exports will be triple-checked and slowed down at ports, the powerful “allied” military won’t show up at your ports (which makes your neighbours think twice about bullying you), etc etc etc. There are a million ways to basically ostracise a country without the issue ever surfacing on international media.

Most smaller countries depend on bigger ones for defence, and often for defence subsidies in order to support the strategic objectives of the bigger powers. So military considerations can be a huge factor in a way it just isn’t with China (not in the same ways, anyway).

Yeah, I know how it is, small countries get gifted one airplane in exchange on buying a dozen or more airplanes, ground vehicles, installing military bases.

My point is that it sucks that IP and copyright laws are forced by the countries with big armies, the big countries impose their values on the most small countries.

> French Polynesia could probably never do this kind of thing to Japan for example.

Just a nitpick but French Polynesia, being French territory, is clearly not averse to stealing technology[0]. On the topic of high-speed trains precisely, I certainly would not be surprised if the TGV had "borrowed" some features from Japan's shinkansen.

[0] https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio...

America owes its very existence to the land it stole from Native Americans. It owes a huge part of its prosperity to the entire lives it stole from generations of black people by using them as draft animal (hence freeing the white man to think about science, mathematics, whatever). The entire material infrastructure that enabled the production of these fruits of the intellect is stolen, with direct violent human consequences (by comparison, the consequence of "IP theft" is that certain already well-to-do entrepreneurs make less money than they think they are entitled to). It's like if I kicked someone out of their house, adducted someone else, put them in my basement in chains to work for me. I then did a bunch of experiments and came up with some nice designs. But as I was the process of monetizing them I realize someone else stole the design for me, and now I suddenly feel morally outraged. How can he do that to me? The injustice!!

(To anyone who's prepared to invoke 'whataboutism' or whatever, note that my point is that the US's moral outrage is hypocritical, given its extensive history of (much more violent) theft. It's not about whether "IP theft" is morally permissible.)

My parents immigrated here. Is it hypocritical for me to be upset about this?

Also my interpretation of the parent post is that we should not attribute China’s success to their authoritarian government without considering IP theft as a major factor.

Don't forget how much American intellectual progress actually came from Europe. Europe did the hard work of educating and raising generations of scientists and other cream of the crop intellectual elites, who then proceeded to get chased away by wars and persecution and ended up in America. I heard some execs in startup land joke about how they managed to "get their Russian scientists" with relief that their intellectual problems will be solved now.

The land was not stolen any more than the native Americans stole it from someone else. Did they have no war before the Europeans came?

America had slavery, but unlike untold other empires and large countries, it ended it. It owes very little if any part of its port-1865 prosperity to the work of slaves, given the destruction wrought by the Civil War.

The fact this got down voted so much proves how American centric this site is. Disgusting

So who are these groups of people with morally irreproachable ancestors who've contributed so much to our world?

I personally like the idea of the ancient Indian college (in modern day Pakistan) that considered knowledge a gift from God (meaning it should be free to all).

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

This idea could propel mankind into the future faster than the steal, iterate, then lock down IP method we are using today.

I agree to make the knowledge to free. They should be public domain, not copyright and patent. (Public domain is what I do, at least. The law ought to abolish copyright and patents (to make them all public domain), in my opinion.)

However, I fail to find the mention in that Wikipedia article (am I not looking enough?)

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