Revisiting the West's view of China internet censorship | Hacker News Reader

Revisiting the West's view of China internet censorship

nytimes.com

18 pointsmoflome26 comments

I think they make a good point about how the laxness of China's intellectual property laws is a boon to consumers, and maybe innovation.

Why make anything if someone is going to just steal it?

Because them stealing it doesn’t entirely deprive you of it since it’s IP

If you're yet looking for a place to manufacture it, when they have already stolen the IP, and are beginning to produce it, you've lost already. It doesn't matter you have the IP if China doesn't respect it.

The idea is like open source software: you create something because you need it, and you benefit from it existing. What other people do with it may or may not be important.

That's fine, but what happens to your R&D costs? Is everybody using the product contributing?

Example: a HW company spends millions, if not hundreds of millions, on developing a new chip/board, expecting the investment to be returned on sales. China steals the IP, and starts manufacturing and selling before them. Company loses all investment on R&D.

Example: pharma company spends hundreds of millions developing a new drug, including decade-long, gruesome FDA approval, expecting to return the investment on sales, including China. Someone steals the documents on manufacturing it. China starts producing the generic before the company even obtains permission. China patents the generic there, so chances for sales in a 1.2 billion economy are zero. India probably follows. Why bother then?

To save lives??

Anyway, in your example the drug is still a monopoly in the US and EU and is likely to be profitable, is it not? Is there an epidemic of pharmaceutical companies going out of business because they can’t assert their IP effectively? Or are they making record profits? But I see your point.

My point is that while sure, that defrays the ability to completely monopolize an innovation, complete monopolization is not necessary to justify invention or development.

For the first example, a company would develop that because they are needed for supercomputers or higher performance for some application. If China wants to make them cheaper, great, it means we can do that application cheaper.

This seems to just be a debate about patents and IP in general. I doubt we can cover much new ground there.

Yes, it does. IP has value.

You create IP to generate value from it. When someone steals IP you lose value that you should have derived from it.

Theft is theft, whether of IP or otherwise. And a thief is a thief, whether of tangible product or IP.

The key word is ‘entirely’.

One may derive benefits from creating something that does not depend on monopolizing it.

You're literally wrong. Intellectual property can't be stolen by definition. You're probably referring to copyright infringement which is a completely different thing from theft, whose application is completely different from country to country and is not sentenced the same way.

You're right. That's why no one ever makes anything in China. In fact, no one makes anything ever if they don't have the byzantine American copyright system to back them up.

Eric Shcmidt made some bold forecast echoing some of this sentiment in a September private VC event.[1]

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-p...

There are two distinct internets already, getting bandwidth to move data in and out of China is an expensive proposition, combined with the Great Firewall makes it such that domestic companies have significant advantages compared to overseas competitors.

Those domestic companies seem to be starting to innovate on their own, though there is quite a bit of back and forth between US researchers and their counterparts in China. Whether or not this will translate to commercial success outside the protective walled garden is questionable, thus far we haven't seen Baidu or others break into major markets outside China and keep its apps, websites, etc popular for more than brief blips.

>Whether or not this will translate to commercial success outside the protective walled garden is questionable...

Is that something the party cares about? (The Communist Party I mean).

Serious question.

How interested are they in having Americans or Bolivians or whatever engage in the daily use of Chinese internet sites and apps? My sense is that they don't really care about that. It seems that it's more a priority that we, on our part, assume the party has. I honestly wonder if they care?

Well if you want to make money from those other people, or have easier access to whats happening in the world globally, yes.

>Well if you want to make money from those other people, or have easier access to whats happening in the world globally...

Here's the thing though, those people can buy tires or pants made in China, WITHOUT using Chinese websites.

I seriously don't think they care if we use Baidu or not. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the party would PREFER that we NOT use Baidu.

> I seriously don't think they care if we use Baidu or not. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the party would PREFER that we NOT use Baidu.

If the world used Baidu, it would be a propaganda coup for the CCP. They'd have the ability to disappear information they want to suppress (like criticism of the camps in Xinjiang), and freely push propaganda and disinformation (a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infektion).

Think about it: if the web existing in the 1980s and the Soviets controlled the world's main search engine, the top results for "AIDS" would be disinformation articles about how the US government created it.

So, I'm sure the CCP would like the world to use Baidu, but it might not be high on their list of priorities to push right now.

> if the web existing in the 1980s and the Soviets controlled the world's main search engine, the top results for "AIDS" would be disinformation articles about how the US government created it.

Soviets tended to play up the bad points in their propaganda, so it would likely be pushing images and videos of people suffering with AIDS, captioned with "American pigs aren't researching or treating this mass epidemic ripping through their capitalist stronghold".

The sad part is such propaganda would be fairly accurate, for most of the 1970s and 1980s our government stood by and let people die of AIDS, not funding research or pushing safe sex education, feeding the epidemic.

> Soviets tended to play up the bad points in their propaganda, so it would likely be pushing images and videos of people suffering with AIDS

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

You do realize there is a lot of money in software services correct? It's not about selling pants, it's about selling ads and digital products to the rest of the world, like sillicon valley. Baidu, tencent, alibaba, xiaomi, etc are some of the largest tech companies in the world and thats with most of their business in China.

Not to mention the enhancement in global surveillance it would give the CCP.

There's far more than two internets.

Russian, Japanese, Chinese, South Korean, German, French, Italian, Brazilian. And on and on.

Don't forget the Iranian & Saudi Arabian internets, they all block different things and have restrictions you wouldn't see elsewhere.

For the point of my original comment though, none of these restricted networks are breeding challengers to the established tech giants like the Chinese Internet is. Kinda surprised there isn't an Indian Baidu/Google, or Tencent/Steam.

Non paywall version here [0], I have to think some Western governments are looking again at China's internet policies for inspiration. Tim Cook, for one, seems [1] to be encouraging it.

[0]: https://outline.com/8LNkuq [1]: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/companies/apple-tim-cook-tec...

China's internet policies are an inspiration for GDPR-style privacy regulation? I don't understand.

No, many neoliberals & center right supporting people like Tim Cook have taken to this idea that we should censor certain views after the defeat of Hillary.

Its a weak argument responding to the expression of the dropping standard of living for the poorest among us here in America, and it was a massive blindspot that Hillary's data science team didn't pick up on: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/9sy7g1/di_...

Edit: People of Tim Cook's beliefs, eg: the Gay Log Cabin Republicans mostly died out during the AIDS crisis. A very similar strain of political ideology was heralded by Hillary in this past electoral cycle. Basically a "Fuck you, got mine. Don't you have magical bootstraps? Oh, here is a tiny, useless smidgen of help".

NYTimes is going overdrive cranking out favorable coverage on China the past couple of days. Perhaps NYTimes editors got some reminder from Wall Street that China again needs to be sold to the American public. Since Wall Street dismantled the American workers 30 years ago with NAFTA and China/WTO, it probably felt like it can do it again with the incoming $250B tariff on Chinese imports.

Problem is, US is winning, big - China Is Paying for Most of Trump's Trade War, Research Says. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-19/china-is-...

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