U.S. business walked into China and handed over all of their technology and Intellectual Property, just to have it used against them by the Chinese government. China has only resorted to hacking lately in order to get more technology and IP.
It got stolen by China. How can that be justified?
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-t...
And sure there are arguments against that justification (and for it).
Stealing it, is not R&D, it's theft and punishable by law.
Eg. Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect and PlayStation Move are the same concepts with a different approach.
What if the Kinect and Move had spent their research budget building on top of the Wii instead of reinventing it? Would the world be a better place?
(Personally, I find it baffling to see people espousing "research should be private because it yields better outcomes" on a site for an industry so deeply indebted to open source. We have empirical evidence about which approach works better, and it's not the closed private research lab one.)
There's an easy solution to reciprocity: abandon IP protection in the US, too. My entire claim is that that would lead to a better world. If we want to not do that, we should either defend that it would lead to a worse world, or admit that we're not making arguments based on what's best for society. That's why I found the argument about "but IP protection brought us Kinect and Move" unconvincing: it's not clear at all to me that the outcome was better than in the world where the US didn't recognize IP protection.
I just think it has to be tweaked for preventing abuse. But it had it's advantages.
If you remove IP protection, why would a company spend millions on research on R&D to innovate something.
Look at the products that got copied from Kickstarter by China before they launched, those people really got their dream crushed.
Ps. Kinect was just an example, look for the bigger picture ;)
Ideas are cheap. These Chinese companies are supposedly taking pre-validated (via crowd funding) ideas from Kickstarter and then manufacturing them. How is this a bad thing? It introduces a desirable competition for the best ability to execute on those plans.
They already did more than "an idea". 3d models, marketing ( eg. Video), product iterations,..
They mostly want funds to manufacture the product, because not everyone can spend money for a MOQ manufacturing run...
What they do is unethical.
Here's some more info: https://qz.com/771727/chinas-factories-in-shenzhen-can-copy-...
I said: the consumers have more options. Personally, I prefer the Kinect. So yes, I'm for diversity.
2) In a forum of "open source" people.
What does this has to do with it? I find it baffling you don't see the difference.
How do you earn your money? Work at a traditional company or did you create you own open-source product with donations?
I'd be damned if you are one of the 0,01% here that earns all his income through open-source.
I find it baffling you don't see the simple difference between software parents and IP ( without software).
Fyi. You are not earning your money through open-source. Otherwise you would know that if not the golden life either.
3) Research should be public?
Wtf? So every company should share everything?
Wtf? How realistic is that???
Answer: it's not. It's never going to happen. Stop dreaming and come back to reality please.
----
In a lot of the responses here, I honestly think that I have to explain it to a 12-year old. Because they don't seem to grasp reality. Or trolls, or Chinese state sponsored propaganda. I really don't understand the low quality of responses, constant Whataboutism ! Unrelated responses). That baffles me at this moment.
If you are against privatisation, great. Go to a communist country and prove it. Don't forget the 996 debacle or Jack Macs response to it.
You only want open-source? Great. Quit your job and prove me wrong that your can get an income there.
You know you won't do any of those both things. But probably you have an excuse. Great, then adjust to reality and stop believing in fairy tales. Adjust your opinion to something realistic.
Open-source takes a long road to profitability, it's not that easy. And probably, because your designs are online, some lower-cost Chinese company will take it and produce it cheaper. Except, if you have build a big community around it, it will work out for them. But the chances are really small.
Open-source always had an Enterprise/cloud option also to earn money. Currently, it's the only stable way ( donations are not a stable source of income)
Now, we are going back in circles about what was the issue...
Um, can't you also work at Red Hat or Mozilla or somewhere? Or even USDS or NASA? (Remember, OpenStack came out of a joint project between NASA and a for-profit company, and plenty of people in both organizations were paid to work on open-source full-time to make it happen....)
Firefox is probably the only one. But they can only hire a limited amount of people and their resources depend on their market share of I'm correct.
A big part of that is the "default search engine setting" ( paid based on market share), so open-source still doesn't pay the bills at the end of the day.
My argument is still valid.
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."
> 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.
Private firms are mostly subsided by government for employment, not for their research
Also, spacemacs.
I really wish we would be able to move past these extremely basic arguments and have some discussion of the topic that isn't repeating the same thing over and over. It's fine to disagree with the duplication argument, but it's a waste of everyone's time to pretend it doesn't exist.
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.
Per the other commenter, unless you're suggesting that private property just shouldn't exist, then your argument falls apart. And if you are arguing private property shouldn't exist, I think you'll find very few takers.
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.
So what is this magical means of Samsung being compensated for their multi-billion dollar investment that China stole that you don't think is a big deal?
As for your analogy, it's patently false that anyone involved wants the candy shared. It's been stolen.
My claim in this thread is that not treating ideas as private property is a defensible and reasonable position to take. When you say that Samsung needs to be "compensated," you make it clear that you're not treating ideas as private property, either. The market value of property is the amount of benefit/enjoyment it provides someone else, not the amount of effort that went into making it. If I spend two hours making a cake, and you spend 30 minutes making a cake, and people want to pay both of us $10 for it, there is no violation of my property rights that I'm not compensated for spending 4x as long. You might casually say that my cake is "a steal," but the cake is definitely not being stolen from me.
If you were arguing about property rights, you would be asking about why Samsung isn't getting paid the fair market value of their ideas, not about why they aren't recouping the investment they put into creating them. (And I've even suggested elsewhere in this thread that compulsory licenses are a way to do this.)
But if you're interested in Samsung recouping their investment, well, we can discuss that but it's absolutely not property rights that are helping them do that today. If we want to discuss that, I'd simultaneously ask how to compensate people for multi-billion dollar investments that don't yield marketable products but are still good for humanity to have done the research.
> As for your analogy, it's patently false that anyone involved wants the candy shared. It's been stolen.
Not sure I follow. Samsung wants to trade phones for money. Samsung does want the phones shared: that's the entire basis of the argument The kid wants to trade candy for reputation. If you prevent Samsung from selling as many phones, no phones are being stolen. (Actually it turns out I didn't even need the analogy here.) If you prevent the kid from giving candy to classmates, no candy is being stolen. Why do you think the candy is being stolen?
i don't quite see it.
if company A aims at the global market with a uniquely innovative product and then company B brings a copy of that product to the global market ten years later, then company A has enjoyed profitability of a unique product for ten years.
but what if company B spies on company A's process and steals copies of its designs and so brings a copy of that product to market ten months later?
isn't that depriving the original owner, company A, of some profits?
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."
e.g. If I were a consultant to, say, Nvidia, and I told them that they were wasting valuable IT personnel time and resources by locking down and protecting their R&D documents, that all of the computers containing such info were needlessly and wastefully secure, and that, in short, there is no harm in making that info available to the public, including to Intel and AMD -- I mean, I just wonder how I would convince them.
Wouldn't they say something like "No. Releasing that info would be harmful to our bottom line, shareholders, and employees whose bonuses depend upon profitability."
If you failed to convince them, would you then conclude that colonization is actually totally fine?
In particular, if someone were advocating for the independence of India in 1850, would you think the British East India Company could justifiably say "You're harming us"? (Sure, they can say it and they probably would say it, but would they have a point?)
I don't feel that the arguments you're presenting would be persuasive to the companies whose secrets are revealed. But, I may well be missing something. In any case, my takeaways from this discussion are:
1. You believe these companies don't have a solid legal case, that they cannot prove "harm" in the legal sense.
2. You believe that the system of protecting IP the US currently (in theory) embraces is sub-optimal for the well-being of the world.
Eg. Product = movies
Eg. Not product = the nude selfies your girlfriend send to you.
It's not applicable to hardware and R&D. Also, it's seriously taken out of it's context to defend piracy.
You are generalizing the slang to everything, which isn't right.
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.
In the meantime, it's just the same. It's you and you have the rights to it.
It solves a problem. Your solution is weird and not generic
Your solution doesn't solve these problems. If you want to solve these problems, you can't use copyright.
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".
I would mind if you break into my house.
R&D documents are not distributed fyi. Totally different things.
PS. I do agree the example isn't that good, because everyone has other opinions. But then again, i don't know if your architect would appreciate it, if you give your plans to someone else.
Because he created it, not you.
The U.S. did the same to Europe in the 17/18th centuries when IT need to bring itself up to par, so did Japan in the 70s/80s - so did the Europeans to the Chinese before that.
China will, (and already does to an extent), innovate and enrich the world, it just needs to catch up fast and this is the best way to do it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...
You mention 1 example where copyright failed ( 20 years ago...). Nothing is perfect also and it doesn't mean it's wrong to protect innovative companies.
But you lack the fundamental understanding that nothing in China has this protection. While our allies do.
Ps. Except if you count the clothes of Ivanka Trump of course, that won copyright infringement case in China.... Which was no way a political intervention to appeal to someone with the trade war happening ;)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/business/ivanka-trump-chi...
Good rules are better than ego-interventions for the 1% every day of the year.
You asked for a justification and you've answered your own question.
It happens because there are no protections for these thins in China. It is not in their culture to assign intellectual property protections in the way US culture does.
There's your justification. Their culture is different and they see yours as ridiculous and unenforceable.
Right now, they have a lot of luck that they are> 1 billion people and stealing everything they can without punishment.
IP-protection would happen for Chinese firms, just not outsiders. Don't change my words.
"This" protection = global protection. China just has "Chinese" protection. It's not in laid out in rules with them, but it means in 99% of the cases that they are an advantage for Chinese firms.
Ps. Blocking the market is an extreme form of IP-protection, it's even just stealing and adjusting the rules ( required Chinese partnerships). They adapted in a very bad way, they also get previous generation tech because firms don't trust it
"The English patent system evolved from its early medieval origins into the first modern patent system that recognised intellectual property in order to stimulate invention; this was the crucial legal foundation upon which the Industrial Revolution could emerge and flourish." ([1]Wikipedia)
Without patents what you do is create trade secrets, patents publish the concepts that are protected, they are fully disclosed (or the patent is junk) and after 25 years anyone can use them. The 25 years is the time that you have to get payback on your invention - forcing investment in development now before your monopoly expires.
Please find me an example that open-sourced everything, with their Enterprise solution.
It didn't require any IP theft for that to happen.
I would hate if this happened to the Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect or Playstation Move.
Which triggered HTC Vice and the Oculus adoption, later on: Hololens. ( So AR and VR)
They got so much better with actual competition and their own R&D instead of just stealing and hurting the innovator.
Us as customers got a lot more options because of competition, not because of theft.
They've lost factories, lost jobs, lost growth momentum, but got cheap TVs.
Hooray?
[0]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO [1]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
You might hate the argument, but it's because the argument is accurate. The increase in US-based production isn't caused by the manufacturing industry kicking ass. It's because they fudge the numbers. They consider a CPU that's sold for twice the $ to be double the production. If you remove the high technology grouping, the US manufacturing base has cratered.
But another way of looking at your stats is that outsourcing labor-heavy jobs to China indeed decreases the amount of jobs available to local people. Industrial output, on the other hand, only grows because of the automation.
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.
When you're well off, as a person or as a country, you can always find people or countries who will manufacture things for you.
But they will want something back. Your real estate. Your universities. Your best people.
It's a high price to pay for a bending phone.
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.
It got stolen by South Korea, how can that be justified?
> The sale is the reward, the assignment came earlier.
Ps. South Korea was the judge, you are not reading it correctly.
From big companies to the lone worker, if IP is not a thing, I don't see how we can evolve technology.
I agree with the idea of not patenting software, since that is already covered by copyright, and patents were never intended to cover algorithms, however, discarding IP altogether seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Lack of IP doesn't shift the power to innovators, it shifts it to the people with printing presses, with large manufacturing plants that can scale, apple music, etc etc.
IP is the very basis for compensation of innovators.
It makes sense that if you make a comic book about a superhero named Jumpman, printing presses shouldn't be able to just 1:1 copy your product and sell it. They also shoudln't be able to use your Jumpman character in their own works.
But we have moved so far that you can copyright generic things like the very concept of a comic book. Or having a HTML image that's also a link. Or having round corners on a mobile device.
The only reason we have anything public at all is because most of these inventions happened before the dawn of oppressive IP laws.
You can't, in fact, copyright any of those things. Were they novel, the first two might be the kind of thing to qualify for utility patents, and the last is presumably a loose description of an actual Apple design patent.
I fully agree. Software patents for example should be abolished, and we should get shorter terms on copyright (20 years after death of creator or 80 years after publication, whatever comes sooner would be a good choice). But the very basic concept of copyright and patent law is still good for the individual creators as well as the commons. Abolishing it does not benefit the creators in general, and only shifts power away from them.
Not true. Copyright originally existed to give governments control over owners of presses in an effort to stop printing of dissenting material. It had nothing to do with compensation for authors.
I mean that producers are now strongly bound to distributors, and companies like Disney basically own everything from top to mostly bottom (they’re getting there with their streaming service).
In today’s world I don’t see “little guys” getting practical benefits by virtue of IP. Is there still a baby in the bath water?
But I don't think copyright amendments have been about protecting creators, or the public domain, for some time.
But this case is exactly the reason why it should exist.
Yes, it should get tweaked a little bit though
Your incentive would be that your product is better and sells more, unless and until everyone copies it. As long as the extra profit exceeds the cost invested, it's worth it.
You're claiming there would be no innovation at all unless there's IP.
How did we innovate for hundreds or thousands of years before IP laws, whether the wheel, ironmaking or any other technology?
To flip your question on its head, if IP laws prevent your innovation from reaching everyone, the benefit to society from this innovation is reduced, and that's bad.
I'm curious if you ever tried to sell anything in large volumes. You can invent a brilliant thing but still have hard times selling it because of a lack of resources for marketing and a lack of established sales channels. At the same time, big resourceful corporations just steal you invention and resell it to existing customer base, use huge marketing resources, benefit from brand awareness, etc.
Inventing something better doesn't automatically guarantee you a solid revenue stream. Monetizing good inventions for a small company is a way less trivial task than it might seem.
Are you talking about software patents?
In this way, eliminating copyright will create a race to the top, making all products better.
So, your fellow student will copycat your essay and essays of those around you. As a result he got the highest GPA. He got that job. You didn't.
Fair? Good for you? Good for the society?
The person that took the time to learn it, will grow with their knowledge.
Its incredibly obvious who can produce stuff.
This becomes a cultural difference, and the innovators continue to be number 1.
Always starting from scratch in your own bubble is inefficient.
EU countries aren't safe either, see Greece and Italy.
This isn't a new strategy. I think the main difference in perception in this case is that it's not us doing it.
Loaning money for Goodwill has always been something.
But loaning money, doing the work with your own employees, suggesting infrastructure that they can hardly afford ( and definitely not maintain), burying the country in debt is something new.
Oh yeah, in the contract ofc, they suggest what can be done if they can't pay back ofc.
= Give infrastructure, natural resources and land
Is it? Having your own companies build infrastructure in foreign lands for your own (trade or war) benefits, and dumping the costs of build and maintenance on the region doesn't sound like a 21st century invention - it sounds like a common strategy of powerful nations.
China needs it's 6% growth and is hustling all other possible countries for it with the "one road, one belt" excuse
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/03/21/future-of-5g-us-allies-d...
And when you then remember the project Gladio revelations of the early 90ies/late 80ies and the fact that the last of America's house trained nazi's(the Gehlen organization) would have retired from west Germany influence and you get the idea that the modern German intelligence services consider some parts of the US intelligence network to have become "captured" by non-democratic interests, something the french realized doing the campaign by the OAS against DeGaule in the 60ies when DeGaule suspected that the CIA was not exactly his ally in trying to stamp out right wing coup mongers from inside the french army.
And while all of this have been published by mainstream academics and journalists it's completely left out of any narrative about America's place in the world put forward by the "mainstream"(as in approved by the establishment) American press today when discussing America's place in a post cold war mercantilist conflict against countries that are not taking orders from Washington, nor buying more from the US then they sell to the US.
The problem here is of cause if you consider American authorities to be captured by an mercantilist elite waging an commercial conflict on everyone else the way America accuse the Chinese of doing then the obvious thing is to ban American and Chinese tech from your networks as neither can be considered reliable partners and to be honest an better argument can be made that America with it's rising domestic problem and declining economy is the party more likely to pull the trigger and cause problems for the European economy by utilizing backdoors for harm, then for China doing the same from a position of economic growth.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-08/chinese-billionaire-h...
https://www.afr.com/news/world/asia/chinese-aid-funded-1-mil...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-22/chau-chak-wing-un-bri...
Nuclear reactors? Machine guns? Bombs? Steam engines? Cannons?
Gunpowder "Theft" dates back to the 14th century. I think everyone will agree that this is realllllly stretching it.
The secret of porcelain making was guarded well by the Chinese, eventually Saxons (or the British, it's disputed who was first) figured it out without their help.
China signed up to the Berne Convention of 1886 on copyright in 1992, three years after USA implemented it.
Berne gives a minimum term of 50 years (loosely speaking) and covers all signatory countries.
Perhaps they shouldn't have signed, or sought to reduce the copyright term?