Chip wars: China, America and silicon supremacy
economist.com
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We have a fabrication plant in Chengdu, it's public knowledge that this fab is helping to manufacture products built on the latest process technology. As I've come to learn more about China's tactics when dealing with foreign companies it's become of great concern to me what this plant means for our future. I don't think it would be far-fetched to assume that some very protected and valuable IP has leeched through our doors and into China's hands. In all honestly I really can't fathom how the American government let this deal occur.
EDIT: To add more information [which is all public knowledge so if you're reading this Intel folks don't track me down! :)] its a packaging / assembly plant working on CoffeLake, which is 14nm++, CPUs are NOT fabbed there as Congress forbids it. My concern is more about the ability for the Chinese to potentially reverse engineer these products at assembly and derive IP. Also.. our packaging technology is pretty advanced so I'm concerned with even having an assembly plant there as well.
greed and cheap labor. the exploited become the exploiter.
For instance, you can only manufacture CPUs in certain countries if the process is a couple of generations old. As Moore's law slow down the improvement from generation to generation will become less, are our current regulations sufficient enough to address this coming future? That's my concern.
Governments can intervene to keep the playing field level, while protecting the national interests.
If it's true that the US has a dominant position in this space, then it's true that the US government has an opportunity to prevent the US companies from shifting manufacturing to where it's likely to result in IP theft in the process of competing with eachother in the manufacturing costs deparment.
If all the companies in the space are forced to ignore the cheaper manufacturing option, that self-destructive avenue of competition is off the table on equal terms. However there's still the threat of foreign competition undercutting on manufacturing, if they catch up in the IP department (which IP theft certainly accelerates).
A very difficult trade-off I guess.
There are things that one should not do no matter how tempting it looks. Rusdian roulette can be very attractive as 5 out 6 persons who tried claimed that it was a harmless.
Happens all the time.
> Your leaders at Intel appear to know more about business than you do: that it is higher risk over the long term to lose market share, because that gives your competitors revenue to support R&D and opportunities to work with and leverage a customer base to develop a better product.
Why would Intel be losing market share by not manufacturing chips in China? They may still manufacture the same number of chips but with less profit.
> China has no problem making a CPU on their own. They just can't make a commercially competitive CPU, yet.
Pretty sure parent comments meant processor fab tech in addition to processor tech. That is, tech that makes it possible to manufacture a competitive CPU at competitive costs.
That's why TSMC and Samsung are spanking Intel in fab technology, which was originally Intel's competitive advantage, because Intel dropped the ball on ARM architecture chips due to its inwards-looking obsession with profitable x86. Intel is now boxed into the same low-volume corner as, say IBM PowerPC and ultimately condemned to irrelevance.
The last thing you want is for the Chinese to start investing in their own fabs and have a captive source of demand for those fabs' output, e.g. x86/x64 chips licensed from AMD. Quite frankly, they're going to steal the technology from TSMC and Samsung, not a has-been like Intel that's been incapable of moving to 10nm.
I'd argue a company like Huawei is probably able to make that kind of fab investment (they also design their own ARM chips), and they've shown in the past they are willing to take the long view by out-investing in R&D their Western competitors managed by the typical short-termist bean counter MBAs. That's why Huawei's CFO (and daughter of the founder) was arrested in Canada, to pressure them not to cooperate with the Chinese government's "Made in China 2025" plan to wean itself off dependence on US-controlled microelectronics. The fact John Bolton admitted he was aware of the move shows it was made on geopolitical grounds.
Yes, I agree it would be nice for the United States if Intel's discount rate was lower, but where's the evidence? Does opening a chip packaging plant in China show "legacy, loyalty to family, country, environmentalism, pride, general ethics, etc"?
>To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose [i.e., seen through rose-tinted glasses]. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.
The preface ends on a wonderful little note that hopefully everyone can agree on:
>Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great Florentine is mine: “Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.” [Follow your own course, and let people talk – paraphrased from Dante] Karl Marx, London. July 25, 1867.
One could spend their whole life studying Marx and not get through half of the work in Marxology (and two lifetimes if we include mathematical Marxism), value theory and classical economics - but to me that makes it all the better.
Were you asking about philosophy in general? In that case, I admit I'm not very well read at all, even on Marx's Hegelian background - but there is a rather famous 4chan /lit/ board guide to philosophy from the start, though in my experience, it need not be read sequentially.
By philology I was referring to the study of the interpretation of Marx specifically - in my opinion it has produced some fascinating results (see Heinrich above, and importantly The Mismeasure of Wealth, which is a a set of essays by contemporary Marxian philosopher Patrick Murray[0]).
Also of interest is the discussion on Marx's more qualitative points besides his theory of value, specifically his theory of history, alienation, technology etc. for which Gerry Cohen and Sean Sayers have plenty, and Peter Hudis[2] claims from a philological point of view, it is easy to see how the USSR's style of socialism would probably come under fire from Marx himself.
On the whole, I'd just like to conclude with the fact that Marxism is very much not a unified school of thought, and in my modest and relatively uninformed opinion, it has only increased fracturing and has been marred by unfortunate internal hostilities after the 70s in which various philosophers tried to salvage what remained, reinvent, reinterpret or deny the grounds on which famous economists like Paul Samuelson and Piero Sraffa dismissed him. Marxism is so fractured that specifically regional schools have emerged, for instance the Uno School in Japan, AM in the Anglo-Saxon world, the Frankfurt School in 20th c. America, Neue Marx-Lektur in the German world etc.
Despite what it may seem, you asked for what I found worthwhile, but I've replied by citing almost all the authors who I've read at least one work of - I've read so little that I literally can't select what's worthwhile and what's not. This means I'm providing a limited picture, so take what I've said with a Capital-sized grain of salt!
[0] The "dialectical presentation" has come under fire from some Marxists as being insufficiently rigorous, outdated etc. - this is the Analytical Marxist school, which Roberto Veneziani (who you might also refer to on the matter of mathematical Marxism, along with Kliman's easy (but thick) "Reclaiming Marx's Capital") has written about: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2125671
[1] "Probing Marx's dialectical accounts of the commodity, value, money, surplus value, wage labour and capital, The Mismeasure of Wealth establishes Marx's singular relevance for critical social theory today."
[2] Peter Hudis - Marx's concept of the Alternative to Capitalism
And the best part is, if you force all the companies to act this way, and get some odd government protection for the large ones, the companies won't even go out of business. It's just society that gets poorer.
If you look at the really cheap multimeters based on the DT830 design root they were originally derived from early Fluke DMMs circa 1985. Fluke hired Intersil to make the ASIC, Intersil second sourced it, the Chinese cloned it and cost optimised it, and then more Chinese guys cloned the target devices (panel meters and DMMs) and built mass production lines. Optimally they even optimised out the DIP packages as they were expensive and bonded the die straight to the PCB.
Down from $500 a pop to $2.
Samsung announced today that the Chinese stole their new bendable screen technology.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-theft...
Just to be clear:
Zen microarch design work started circa-2012. The USD$300m deal was circa-4/2016.
It's accurate to say the capital from the deal likely helped AMD finalize, produce, and distribute Zen / Epyc.
But the microarchitecture design innovation predated the cash infusion.
It didn't, it just gave a pass / access to Alibaba and Tencent as well as other Government related project to use AMD CPU.
Look at their balance sheet, and note that without the $300M infusion, the market would have been spooked by their debt levels.
(So far as I know anyway)
I'd expect there's a huge validation stage involved-- flaws in the extraction process could give you a plausible looking but ultimately faulty design to work with, and you have to check and clean that up.
Moreover, if you don't have exactly Intel's fab technology and oral-tradition knowledge, you probably have to retool the design to be more suited to the process you have.
It might still be a boost over whatever they have to offer now, but by the time it hits the market, it would be a generation or two old.
Would that be substantially more difficult with the finished product?
The smaller your feature sizes, the higher the probability that opening the chip to reverse engineer the wafer will rip up part of the silicon you're trying to see. The most interesting pieces of an integrated circuit also tend to be thermal hotspots (i.e. the Intel CPU instruction pipeline vs the cache) which are more likely to be destroyed because they use a stronger bonding material.
The Chinese are, along with the Russians, probably at the top of the world's best reverse-engineers. You can bet they'll have already reverse-engineered it even if it wasn't made in their country.
Now Intel has a lot manufacturing based in the US, like I said Congress passed a law to make that happen. But have we looked into why we're allowing Foxconn to get tax breaks to build in "heartland" America but not Intel? An iconic American name?
In China and most of Asia, you easily can. While these people won't be MIT grads, you can expect significantly higher scientific temperament compared to $MiddleOfNowhere, Utah.
The reason that Silicon Valley has so many of the Chinese/Indian/Other nationalities is simply because of the volume of available "Good Enough" Engineering talent. In most of these cultures a Master's degree is almost the norm. With this in hand, the practical aspects can often be learnt in training/on-the-job. Given that much of Modern Engineering has been systematically streamlined and commoditized, you really don't need very much "Creative" and "Out-of-the-Box" thinking as much as people who can manage and contribute within the existing framework and systems.
I can't express my distaste such companies any more without entering explicit territory.
You wouldn't but enough people are, apparently, hiring them to do quite a lot of IT work nobody else would touch. Otherwise their business model wouldn't work at all.
Nationally Walmart is at $11, Target is at $12 and Amazon is at $15. Outside of convenience stores and fast food, increasingly that's your floor now.
Your $9 would actually be $30 / hour, at the absolute minimum. And you'd never get enough employees.
I was getting 12 as a qualified heavy equipment operator not not long ago.
Should have changed your name for this post that doesn't put Intel in a good light: Just by your posting history they can probably track you down. Black activist--start from there and see if you made any complaints or suggestions to intel. Plus our style of writing is more or less unique.
But I agree with others, Intel management (at a certain point) may have interests that might be against the long term interests of Intel. Say, bonuses. That's the worst, but they may also make mistakes in deciding pro-cons.
Lastly, say that tech is worth $25Billion to Intel, and after x years is essentially worthless. Intel gets $15Billion from China in tax breaks, and sells more than $10B to others meanwhile. So economically it's worth to Intel and China gets the tech. But it is worth to our NatSec?
I would guess the cost structure of chip manufacturing is heavy towards things other than personnel costs... but is that really so?
Is the waste management more "flexible"? Is it the price of electricity that is cheaper? Or what is it?
Which is the whole Trade War argument about Free market, access and IP. I am not sure how long before the West learn they can expect whatever International "Standard" and "Values" to ever work in China.
> I don't think it would be far-fetched to assume that some very protected and valuable IP has leeched through our doors and into China's hands.
China has a "technology transfer policy" for foreign companies doing business in china. So if intel has a fab in china, they agreed to the technology transfer.
> In all honestly I really can't fathom how the American government let this deal occur.
Probably because it benefited US companies and the wealthy.
If china is stealing anything, it's here in the US, not from intel who agreed to trade technology for chinese market access.
I've lately been having this fantasy, or day dream perhaps, where China or the US declares war on the other. The world cowers in fear at the impending catastrophic conflict, yet as the hours drag on, it becomes clear that nothing is happening. It turns out that the only net effect of the declaration of war is that 10 minutes later, every piece of military equipment either country has was bricked by the other's hackers and both militaries are now more-or-less sitting on their butts, twiddling their thumbs.
In which case the victory goes to Russia, I suppose.
And, arguably, the cold war was similar and it seemed to have a net positive impact on research and development for both nations... It was just a matter of who could run the longest.
Enough gear isn't networked or has fallbacks. C2 on the other hand, I'm less sure of. The French were so disturbed that they hacked the computers used by very senior people in the American military that they told the Americans so they would secure it better.
Far more likely is that both sides (other than Trump himself, maybe) know to default to standing down and absorbing the first blow then retaliate, if needed.
Is there military crap? Sure. But part of the reason for double-price contracts is hardening and properly securing software.
Folks don't just sit at the Naval War College twiddling their fingers.
Which is, paradoxically, why massive numbers of traceable nuclear weapons + early warning actually make the world a safer place. (At least for major-power, global conflicts)
But tech espionage would fit nicely into a different, long-term game. There is (of course) a lot of work left to do spread the modern economy to the rest of their country. But if they can do that, they will have a huge population advantage and be the largest market in the world. Meanwhile they are already competitive (if not dominant) in manufacturing. So what's left? Tech.
If they can become competitive with (or even leap-frog) the West technologically, they'll really be the de-facto leader of the world in every economic dimension.
Oh, absolutely, total collapse is a fantasy.
How serious would the degradation be, now, that's an interesting question that probably literally nobody can answer.
But it's an amusing fantasy, and just connected enough to reality to not be in same nonsense realm as an alien eliminating all weapons or something.
Recently, I visited Korea and was told that Chinese semiconductor companies are recruiting semiconductor process engineers from Korea, paying them 3-5x their Korean salary under 5 year contracts, effectively buying out their career. This could be an effective approach to garner the technical expertise needed, but I wonder whether it will simply repeat the outcome of the equipment effort: Experts were brought in and paid well for their knowledge, but it could not be realized due to business cultural or management style constraints.
This is my personal and obviously limited experience, but in the end, fabricating semiconductors is a multidisciplinary endeavor of great complexity. Success depends equally on commitment, pragmatism and effective collaboration, as it does on technical excellence. That is the price of entry to leading edge technical achievement and I'm not sure the Chinese industrial firms are there yet.
Greed won't disappear, but you can shift the balance to a more western friendly country.
They are already destroying a lot of countries. They borrow money to them, so the Chinese can build their infrastructure. But there are almost no locals involved, so all the artificial inflation goes to China. The belt is just an excuse for colonizing the world ( or at least the harbors, strategic airports that they themselves have built, see Sri Lanka, they are the first to comply).
I think a lot of those countries that built a dam with Chinese money forget that maintenance costs a lot also. Reference: FIFA football stadiums
Ps. Feel free to share your concern
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
According to Perkins, his role at Main was to convince leaders of underdeveloped countries to accept substantial development loans for large construction and engineering projects that would primarily help the richest families and local elites, rather than the poor, while making sure that these projects were contracted to U.S. companies. Later these loans would give the U.S. political influence and access to natural resources for U.S. companies
India would do the same if it had the capital resources.
+ There is a difference, companies can have PR issues now without just paying off some key figures ( internet). Not saying that it's not possible, but it should be ( and is) harder than the pre & internet age.
China hasn't got that problem, because they control their internet. And trying to control yours ( free internet through satellites)
Software is unique every project, it's hard to outsource quality. The best ones aren't looking for work, because they have plenty
A very popular JS framework, Vue.JS, is Chinese made. These things used to be US made.
Also, Facebook is said to target TikTok by releasing apps and features to compete with them. It used to be the other way around.
The word is that Chinese are on the cutting edge of AI research too.
Nore and more it feels like the state of the art of Software is no longer tied to the Silicon Valley. Interesting times.
I do see that apparently the creator of Vue.JS was born in China, and then worked at Google in America. Beyond that I’m not clear on the details.
TikTok's audience is too young and SnapChat wasn't really competition for Facebook ( WhatsApp was)
I do recognise I was surprised to see TikTok by my neece. It's not a threat yet ( the audience is too young), but they are upping their skills considerately lately
It never been. Just look for example how many software were/is created in Europe, especially open source.
It needs Packages, materials, PCB houses etc ideally all near by, with good transportation networks, etc. That was what ShenZhen was good at. It took very low cost labors and supported government and a lot time to build up.
Take a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF-zoVzA on how to build IPhone from parts bought in ShenZhen public market to see the supported systems needed for HW. You can imagine how much easier and faster to prototype/build HW (drone, robots, etc) in ShenZhen as compare to anywhere else in the world (for now).
As the labor cost goes up in ShenZhen / China, the significant advantages are gone. That's why China is trying to move up via Tech/IP, etc.
Same development processes happened in Japan, Korea, Taiwan for the past 40-50 years. All of them start with unskilled Textile -> toy assembly -> Electonic PCB assembly -> PCB Design -> Simple Asic / Systems-> Complex ASIC / Complex Systems.
As they move up the food chain, they all "clone / steal / borrow / learn" ip from more developed nations.
It is also repeating the process 150 years ago where UK invented the Train/Rail system and US just scaled/improved to much bigger system.
History just keep repeating.
But in the context of outsourcing, dropping a company ( which I summarized infrastructure with: "drop company"), hardware is a lot easier.
You do have a lot to do initially, but big companies have their "procedure". Follow the procedure and everything could be almost right initially.
Software projects can't expand like that "by the book".
Every extra ( new) employee on a project could even move the finish of it 6 months further.
When choosing between India/Taiwan/Malaysia/Costa Rica/etc, you then need to consider the track record of these various second choices. India's record of disregard for IP [1], political unrest [2], and playing the US and China off one another [3] don't really do it many favors.
That said, I definitely agree that we should begin making major investments of equal magnitude to what was done in 90s/00s PRC in countries aligned with Western technology norms (whatever those are).
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-ip-idUSKCN0XO1I... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-30/modi-s-po... [3] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-india-balance-betwe...
Farmers protest = political unrest for you? Are you even serious?
India has gone through harsher political climate and emerged unscathed.
everything is fine here.
Someday Foxconn will figure out how to do without Apple in phones.
Samsung is the closest match.
While I don't like Intel, I really fear that they'll decide to stop progressing and will continue to use 14nm while they still can squeeze any profits. Those tiny processes require tremendous investments and it's unlikely that new players will appear there, at least old ones should survive and compete.
- Intel: CPUs
- Samsung: Memory
- TSMC: Foundry (make chips that others design)
I have heard that some forms of Chinese protectionism are a little more subtle: apparently, the government requires foreign companies manufacturing in China to buy batteries from the domestic Chinese battery industry. Only Chinese companies can buy from the (better, cheaper) foreign companies. I don't remember where I read this though.
The way to develop a powerful industry is protectionism. When you have achieved it, the way to avoid others develop powerful industries is free trade.
It was not by way of free trade that the USA, Germany or Japan developed.
Here's one example. Chinese consumers use Alibaba, not Amazon. They use QQ, not Twitter. They use Baidu, not Google. In all of those cases, the foreign brands are higher quality products.
The US didn't "lose" that, it gave it away for the low wage manufacturing and thus increased profit margins. Putting the blame for this on China, like the US would act any differently if the roles were reversed, is imho quite hypocrite.
Just like the US also ain't above using its global military and intelligence dominance for some good old industrial espionage. [0]
I'm also pretty sure plenty of Chinese have figured out how to do without Apple [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...
But the entire setup of China is made for stealing tech from companies who invest there, this doesn't mean anyone isn't hardworking or hasn't got any talent. I know Chinese are hardworking.
Also, hardware needs a lot of capital in Western countries, workers are expensive.
Starting for yourselve ( with software) and gradually growing is a lot "easier" if you aren't rich.
Based on my experience, it's also complete bullshit.
I work at a chip company in the US. Our (chip engineering) workforce is probably about half White Americans. The other half are predominantly Indian, with significant numbers of other Asians. (It's also almost entirely male, because 2018.)
At my previous employer, also a chip company in the US, the workforce was even more heavily skewed to White Americans. Probably at least 70%.
I can point to a great number of very smart, hard-working, dedicated, and capable co-workers in every one of these racial groups.
That's a really weird statement. A large part of China has no foreign dependencies. China has a vibrant and closed ecosystem tech industry right now -> Most of the Chinese tech startups nowadays have diverged so much from other countries and they're mostly focusing on Chinese market.
Ps. Alibaba and jb.com are 2 of them for mostly outside of China. Tescent is "mostly" Chinese gamers
Do not go down that road, please.
Following the site guidelines also means not using flamewar tropes like "Oh please", and refraining from nationalistic flamewar in general. "The Chinese always sprout up" is a pretty gross thing to see here.
So yeah, this wasn't what I had in mind. Human error.
My prediction: If and When the demise of American Tech. supremacy happens, the main culprits will be the American "Management" and "Finance" industry folks. Hubris and Complacency have been legitimized and are ruling the roost.
So true! It's tempting, I'm a hardware engineer, but I know I can make more as a software engineer working in web tech. I think the issue for VCs and such is that competitive VLSI design is so much work that it's really limited to big companies who have large budgets to afford the engineering costs.
Personally, I wish there existed more high level HDLs for (at the very least) programming FPGAs and creating chip designs. I am also excited for RISC-V. I hope that as we start to run into limitations in lithography, we get more creative with our chip designs, and as a result, we see more players in the space.
But people have to live shittily.
When your industrial base depends on IP, like in the US, it's very challenging to defend secrets, especially in a free society. Competing on IP alone is very risky. You have to spend exorbitant amounts of money on security.
But at least I can live wherever I want, freely vote for who represents me, don't get sent to prison camps to make living space for the ethnic majority, have pretty clean air and water, aspire to treat the downtrodden humanely, treat people who aren't my blood relatives humanely, trust my social systems, travel freely, say whatever I want, and do something with my life other than engineering, making money or achieving subsistence survival. The investment in human capital, that makes American labor so expensive, makes it durably valuable regardless of technology, government or foreign relations.
Wait isn't that supposed to be the tradeoffs part?
There are much easier ways to achieve the same end, like devaluation of your currency.
Germany did it
> Beginning in 2005, however, unemployment figures began falling and, in May 2007, unemployment was at 3.8 million people, a 5½ year low.
> As of 2008, the wage share of national income had been cut to a 50-year low of only 64.5%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept
The SPD went from being the senior partner in the governing coalition to being the junior one after the next election. The reforms were not rolled back.
US greatest talent is (perhaps was) it’s ability to attract the talent of the world and creating great value out of it. This happened primarily during and after the world wars was as many nations were becoming more hostile places and American open culture and values became a refuge for many. US will only truly lose it’s leadership position when it gives up on moral leadership.
There's one thing US did that was quite close to China is doing now in Africa: Marshal Plan. It was long time ago.
Western media totally misread the real situation. HNer's seems have less population from Africa but more from US/Europa because of majority of them are form tech industry. But if you go to Youtube which has more average people, you will find a lot more African. The tone is quite different.
Honestly, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop in the IP industry. But I'm not sure it's going to be the Chinarmageddon scenario we always hear about.
Plenty of countries are net losers in the IP-based economy... they're paying for foreign-owned patents and copyrights but have little of their own to sell. The balance is probably worse the less developed the country is.
Unlike most third world economic problems, though, this can be resolved by the stroke of a pen-- withdrawing from the legal and treaty frameworks that support the copyright and patent systems. Someone's going to try it, probably with a marketable justification of "if we void the patents on foreign drugs/fertilizers/seeds/infrastructure tech, we can make it cheaply for our own consumption" or "we can't afford to be paying for foreign software."
When it happens, I expect to see it ripple quickly. It's not something you can militarily or economically retaliate for (the optics would be terrible) and the only losers are the countries that staked their economy on convincing everyone to treat infinitely-duplicable knowledge as scarce.
On the other hand, what are the advantages of IP theft? One that I can see is that it creates more competition. I don't know if it helps much in the long run though: if the competitors are just copying the leader, it's probably not adding any value.
Any other pros and cons?
I'm personally an IP abolitionist but can recognize that China is abusing its position here. It doesn't hurt the US nearly as much as it does Southeast Asia, India, Japan, Korea etc that by and large obey US IP law. That was in part what the TPP was meant to enshrine in more formalized, consistent, and persistent terms - the Asian nations agree to obey US IP imperialism while the US gives them advantageous trade opportunities over China. A large degree of why it was so heinous was because of how biased it was in favor of the US because of how desperately the countries surrounding China wanted a competitive edge over their ability to ignore US IP.
In many ways Trumps China tariffs are giving a lot of these nations what they wanted without getting anything in return from them.
However, I was asking about the effect on the world as a whole. Taking some wealth from one country and giving it to another isn't directly changing the amount of wealth in the world. But some second order effects may come into play that do change the global wealth.
If I could only have one of the three I’d keep trademarks.
But I think copyrights are pretty harmless, given the fair use provision and a sensible cutoff. Like 50 years seems like plenty of times to diversify those assets.
I’m an anarchist generally, and I can definitely envision a world where all IP rights are abolished, but I think I’d want to go there slowly, one right at a time. Because the capitalist mechanism will by default harm people so we need syndicalist institutions in place before we open the floodgates to the abuse of the markets.
One systemic advantage is an anti-oligarchic one in that it prevents abusing the IP incumbent from abusing their position too greatly - often seen with prescription drugs. If they charge so much that it would be cheaper to just reverse engineer it and start producing it locally (not a cheap or easy task) - well that is what they are going to do, thus encouraging more reasonableness.
The third potential advantage is highly situational and an ironic opposite effect of the reduce R&D incentive. If the market is hot enough to sustain it a constantly changing market is a working strategy to encourage maximized innovation - if anybody can just copy the previous one in say a year but a superior product can be made by then it means that a constant cycle of innovation keeps them on top. As opposed to a protected situation which would allow for innovating only when someone else might catch up on their own or the protection expires. While the later would be better for them it would be worse for the world if say Moore's law behavior applied only every decade.
The equilibrium R&D investment level depends in a very complicated way on the relationship between your market share at any point and the entire history of your investment. I won't be surprised if that equilibrium level goes up as IP protection period shortens.
Of course, there is no objective way to decide what the socially optimal level of R&D investment is in the first place. I guess we can just assume that the higher the better, as long as the economy still produces some food :)
[1] https://github.com/SymbiFlow/ideas/issues/19
We have a couple production plants in China. I haven't seen any concrete evidence that the employees are stealing IP. And if they are, they do a poor job of reproducing it because they're almost never as good as the real thing.
Not to say it doesn't happen, but I just find it humorous that a lot of buzz is around China precisely because most manufacturing is from there and not other nations. There's also a lot of claims in reports, but no hard proof.
There's also no examination of the victims practices or its done very poorly. Not practicing good IP protection like obfuscation in your code, encryption, anti-tamper mechanisms which, from my experience, many American companies don't practice, is just asking for trouble. They may be doing this, but its never mentioned in news articles.
Of course, given enough time and resources, most things can be cracked. However, that's no excuse to make it easy.
When the LS 400 was disassembled for engineering analysis, Cadillac engineers concluded that the vehicle could not be built using existing GM methods