As China Hacked, U.S. Businesses Turned a Blind Eye

Yes, it is. An architect works with local contractors for convenience.

China needs it's 6% growth and is hustling all other possible countries for it with the "one road, one belt" excuse

Yes.

Yes, I'm not claiming that violating the laws and norms is a good thing. I'm asking if the laws and norms are defensible and produce a better society. If not, then the argument needs to be "We follow unjust laws for the sake of the broader principle of the rule of law, and we work to change unjust laws so respect for law is maintained," not "These outcomes are bad."

> Research should be public?

> Wtf? So every company should share everything?

> Wtf? How realistic is that???

That's not what "research should be public" means. It just means that the existing institutions which the public funds for research (universities and research labs) should have their remit expanded to include "private" R&D for public benefit; and that, additionally, the public sector should routinely buy out valuable private R&D, perhaps via formally-established "prizes" - instead of merely allowing it to be monopolized via IP protection. We spend a lot of tax money already to fund private R&D by firms, that could instead be directed to fund these mechanisms.

I believe strongly that privatization of so much we depend on is harmful. I think people are suffering because of this, making the situation urgent. I see that we can develop the technology we need all as open source. Funding is an important challenge but one I believe is possible to overcome. Look at Prusa Research and their all open source 3D printer with rave reviews. They’ve funded research, development, customer service, manufacturing, and worldwide promotional tours all with a machine that is open source. Why can’t we do that with medical equipment and computers and automobile and factory automation? In fact we could. And thus I strongly advocate that we invest great effort in this. I wish to withdraw as much as possible my support of a closed proprietary privatized system and put my daily efforts in to something open for everyone.

1) If you do not think the legitimate purpose of laws is to make the world a better place and nothing else, we do not agree on fundamentals, and I see you as a dangerous enemy, someone who would be a dictator or oppressor if they could. Using the government's monopoly on violence to make you happier with no concern for the rest of society is an evil thing.

Why is the legitimate purpose of laws to make you happier as a consumer?? What does that have to do with anything? (And, to the point I was originally making, why do you believe you wouldn't be even happier in the world I describe? You'd get a Kinect researched with awareness of what the Wii and Move tried and didn't, so it'd either be better or cheaper or perhaps both.)

2) Again, the legitimate purpose of government is not to preserve the way I make money, either. You're making the "Yet you participate in society!" argument. Yes, I do. The fact that I think a certain course of action is individually rational for me to preserve life and health does not mean I think the availability of that course, to the exclusion of other possible courses, is inherently good or worth preserving.

But just so you know: I maintain systems infrastructure for a hedge fund, all based on open-source software (Debian, OpenStack, Ceph, etc.). The hedge fund operates on secrecy of market data and insights but not on secrecy of fundamental research (and also making e.g. Linux available to everyone makes everyone more productive, but making our ideas about alpha available to everyone makes the alpha go away). To be clear, working at a hedge fund does not mean that I think the existence of hedge funds is inherently good or that I am opposed to societies where hedge funds don't exist, any more than working at Blockbuster means you're opposed to Netflix existing. My work is all on things that would benefit the world more if they were public and would benefit my employer no less; it's just difficult to maintain a separation between publishable work and sensitive algorithms, so I don't do as much as I'd like. But I'd like to do more, and I've quite loudly disagreed with our internal policies on this, because I think I can do better for the world and for our company if allowed to be public about everything. And my work, in any case, is keeping them running, not creating new private ideas. The public knows how to create sandwiches, and yet Subway is profitable.

And it is beyond clear that my company would be less profitable if open source software did not exist, or if we used a proprietary stack/vendor for everything.

3) Yes, it's realistic. You haven't presented an argument beyond "Nyeh, it's not," so I say, "Nyeh, is too."

That doesn't follow - both vi and emacs have been able to be aware of each other and if necessary incorporate techniques from each other, and yet they both exist separately. At no point did I argue that we should prevent people from making two separate products if they want. I only argued that we should prevent people from keeping research and discoveries secret, and gave an example that different products could build on each other. vi and emacs have in fact had that opportunity, so this example supports my point that it's a reasonable way for the world to work. Sometimes building on each other means collaborating; something it means friendly and open competition for the sake of taking multiple approaches to a goal (which is different from competition-for-the-sake-of-competition by forcing your competitors to walk the same path you already walked, but several steps behind you).

Also, spacemacs.

Depriving someone of potential profits isn't legally actionable harm. Otherwise we'd have to say that entering a market as a lower-cost and/or higher-quality competitor is a violation of the property rights, a theft of profit, of the existing participants.

You may or may not have a right to a fair market, and fairness may or may not include the right to secret research and development, but it's not because an unfair market harms your property rights or is "theft."

True, but this harm is handily offset by the benefit of an expanded use for the original tech, due to the very fact of its lower price. Critically, the more the thief is able to "undercut" e.g. Samsung on pricing, the higher this benefit. IP protection is thus more socially beneficial for tech that is expensive per se, because then there is too little "undercutting" to matter, and more like a direct transfer in value away from the creators. Folding phones are an interesting case; they obviously cannot be duplicated "costlessly", but their raw manufacturing costs are low enough that IP protection for them might still be somewhat undesirable.

There are other ways to solve that problem. One of the more straightforward ways (with precedent in US law) is a compulsory license: allow anyone to get a license to use the invention if they pay Samsung, without giving Samsung the opportunity to refuse.

Other options include collective funding of R&D (either the government-funding model, popular in the US for landing on the moon and creating the internet and taking a photo of a black hole, or the voluntary-collective model, popular in the US for creating basically all the technology we're using to have this conversation). If collective funding is more productive, this compensates the participants for R&D. And it may be subject to a prisoner's-dilemma problem, where any one entity can profitably defect even if everyone would be better off if no one did. Creating prisoner's-dilemma situation doesn't seem like a just use of the powers of government.

This is a bad argument (as in, an argument that if followed leads to harmful conclusions) because it says the reason that redistribution of private naked selfies is bad is it harms the market value of naked selfies. It leads to all sorts of exciting nonsense like using the DMCA to stop revenge porn, and useless situations like the copyright owner of nonconsensual naked selfies being the photographer and not the subject.

Let's instead say that people have a right to control of their naked image for reasons that aren't about the property rights to the photo.

This is a different argument for property than the one I was referencing. (I'm not arguing it's wrong, just that it's different.)

The argument I'm talking about is that the right to private property is the right to ownership/control. If I have X, and I am deprived of it / it is taken from me, it is unjust.

The argument you are referencing is that the right to private property is the right to exchange it at a certain value, and a negative impact on its market value is unjust. I can see some cases where this is true (e.g., buying a name-brand purse and finding it's an equally functional counterfeit), some where it's debatable (e.g., buying a house in a quiet neighborhood that gets loud), and some where it's not (e.g., buying a large quantity of a psychoactive substance that isn't controlled and then having it become controlled). So it seems like a weaker argument to me. I think you can still defend it by saying that the not-unjust cases are because there's a greater good / more important right being protected. But I also think you can just hold to the other definition of the right to private property.

In kindergartener terms: if I bring candy to school and my teacher takes it from me and eats it, that's wrong, that's stealing. If I bring candy to school with the intent to give it to other kids to boost my popularity, and the teacher tells me I can't do that and have to keep the candy in my bag, that doesn't seem like stealing.

I agree that compensating inventors is important. I disagree that treating inventions as property is the only way to do it.

I'm not sure this is historically supported. There's a long list of innovators who do not end up making the lion's share off of their achievements. I think innovation is just what we (humans ... or maybe even life in general?) do best and cultural values and need dictate how resources are allocated in this respect.

> If you are just going to get it stolen, others will just invest in stealing. No one will waste on r&d.

Okay, why does Linux exist? And why is it competitive with every proprietary OS kernel? And why does it get development from for-profit companies?

> There are reasons we have laws.

Of course there are. Many of those reasons are not good. In the specific realm of intellectual property law, some of those reasons are "because Disney has lobbyists".

Jobs are one way of manufacturing things people need or want. They're not the only way, unless we're playing semantic games by defining "jobs" in one sentence as "people offering 8h/day of their labor in the free market" and in the next as "people doing things"—and even if we are, let's at least be honest about the difference between "people doing things that are actually inherently productive and efficient" and "people doing things that are inefficient because we want the excuse to pay them for it." Job growth because it enables manufacturing is one thing; job growth because it enables paying people is quite another. As we become more efficient and automated in manufacturing, we'll have to decide what to do when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. There are ways to continue giving people money to buy the things they need or want—or perhaps enable them to get the things they need or want without money—without requiring them to have jobs, or making that money proportional to the market value of their work. And they seem quite ethical.

That's why I say that jobs aren't an inherent good. They're a means to an inherently-good end. That makes them conditionally good, so long as they continue to serve the end. Prioritizing the means over the end would be a mistake.

There is no comparable alternative to giving people the things they need or want. I can think of a few (e.g., drugging people, plugging them into the Matrix) and they're unethical.

That's pretty much exactly what I mean. Sure, some jobs have left the country, but those no longer count in our industrial output index referenced in my parent comments. And I'd argue many of these jobs would have been eliminated with automation if they'd staying in the US anyway.

Our native industrial output has increased but via automation that actually made jobs decrease. The situation with Carrier, manufacturer of HVAC systems, is a perfect example. They were given a tax break to keep a manufacturing plant in the US, but explicitly stated they'd be investing $13 million in automation that would reduce the number of jobs needed. No other country is getting these jobs instead of the US. The jobs are simply gone, through automation.

Do you have disaggregated stats that demonstrate this? Because a lot of that tech sector output isn't in the US. Sure, Intel may design their chips here, but they're manufactured internationally. Partly in the US, but also Ireland, Israel and China. So that doesn't count in favor of our industrial output index.