There's a few ways to justify it I imagine. One is "it saved $130M from being spent again on the same thing".
And sure there are arguments against that justification (and for it).
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.
> 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
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."
Also, spacemacs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".