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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

I would like to challenge anyone who's immediate response to this is "China are always stealing our intellectual property" to stop, and really consider whether IP laws are providing a net benefit here.

Sure they provide an incentive to innovate, but they also actively prevent others from innovating. This technology will now be available to many more people, and can now be built on and developed.

It's a very capitalistic view to think that the only motivation to innovate is the profit motive. And it surprises me little that an economy which functions on very different principles also takes a very different attitude to knowledge sharing. Even if we don't wish to emulate this way of doing things entirely, perhaps we all have something to learn from this difference in perspective.

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The problem is that it does affect the free market systems that China trades with. If China didn't trade with other countries I would agree, however Chinese companies do trade in massive amounts, and the government has signed on as a member of the WTO. They agreed to certain rules of the road when dealing with foreign market economies and have benefit greatly from selling goods and services abroad. And in those market economies, expensive R&D that is cheaply replicatable is disincentivized without IP- the dominant strategy is to just wait for a competitor to innovate and then clone them. IP is a hack that balances out this strategy with licensing costs. If you remove the licensing costs, the free market most likely won't incentivize expensive R&D, and there will be a net loss to everyone in the market system. So of course people in the capitalist market system are kvetching about how they are competing with someone who doesn't pay licensing fees to balance out R&D costs.

The difference between patent trolls and protecting capital intensive IP for a "head start" to get to market are so hugely different. It's not a difference in perspective. It's a harmful act of laziness.

I've heard that what was stolen was mainly internal documentation on how the engines comply with the various regulatory frameworks, which were designed around the specific Western families of engines that existed and evolved with them. If that's all true and China was more than capable of building an engine with the same performance and safety as their Western counterparts, but simply wouldn't have been certified due to not being a slight variation of an existing design, would that change your judgment?

Given that China has struggled to produce a jet engine even for _military_ uses, which is in no way hindered by western regulatory frameworks, I think the burden of proof is on your side:

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-air-force-has-...

I mean, they supposedly stole the full plans for everything related to the F22 and F35, including their engines. So, that doesn't really jive with your idea that it's lack of access to IP there.

What's way more likely given all that is that Chinese companies so contract lots of the commercial engines' components, it's that putting it together and filli g in the gaps in a way that passes cert is the issue. The fighter jets engine components are starting from scratch, and being very very different designs that are much more exotic from a materials science perspective.

> I mean, they supposedly stole the full plans for everything related to the F22 and F35, including their engines.

Even if that's true, plans will only tell you so much.

Why should you care about net benefit when you're dealing with a geopolitical rival?

Sports teams aren't happy when scored on because the total score went up.

Maybe bad if you look from the perspective of a single team. However, if the overall techniques and qualities of sports teams went up, it can lead to more interesting matches and innovation.

I think I’ll decline the “more interesting” arms race, though.

Maybe sports teams are a horrible way to think about it.

Sports teams is putting things lightly. It's a bad idea to let your industries fail, while your rival's grow at your expense. You can already see what happens to those over whom China gains influence - economic power is a large part of that.

If a Chinese family goes from a 3rd-world life to a modern one, is that a relative loss for America? In sports, it would be.

Yes, we should be firm about our interests. No, we shouldn't be obsessed with some 'score' -- or if we are, maybe channel it towards fixing our own house.

And if a Chinese airplane manufacturer out-competes a US one, causing it to fail, its workers go unemployed, weakening the US economy, and making it more dependent on China?

How long does an average company last, if it gives away all its IP and know-how? Why should the result differ on the scale of countries? I assumed these dynamics are obvious to everyone.

> And if a Chinese airplane manufacturer out-competes a US one, causing it to fail, its workers go unemployed, weakening the US economy, and making it more dependent on China?

This won't happen, because despite the US's public insistence that free markets should be enforced everywhere, it is in fact quite protectionist over several of its industries, aerospace being one of them.

A wise company with secret sauce wouldn't give it away.

If our corporate culture is pathologically short-term-obsessed, that's on us. It's not on the 'bad guys' who lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Being the victim of espionage isn't 'giving it away' - but I see you're being deliberately obtuse.

Great. Let them steal from themselves. Leave us out of it.

>It's a very capitalistic view to think that the only motivation to innovate is the profit motive.

But isn't your entire argument self-contradictory with the story? This isn't a case of them developing them same thing and then, say, ignoring being sued over patent infringement or something. This is them just taking it instead. If your argument was right that IP wasn't useful for innovation, then they wouldn't need to take it from others, they could create it themselves. They've certainly got enough of a unified population, and can even see where others have gone first.

More fundamentally, IP is not at the core about "motivation", it's a hack to deal with a limited resource problem. Replicating information is essentially free, but generating it is not. R&D, particularly in areas where iteration requires enormous capital expenditure and there is a lot of finding paths in the dark, takes significant resources. And since we don't have unlimited amounts of those, decisions have to be made about how and where to spend them. The market, properly used, has proven to be one of our most effective tools for dealing with efficient resource allocation. Markets though normally are based around the specific resources and replication. IP attempts to graft that. IP also is intended to encourage sharing and decrease inefficient efforts to hide valuable information through technical and personnel based means.

As I said it's a hack, because information isn't the same as real world materials. There are different costs to society in maintaining it, and it requires societal cooperation in a way that defending limited physical property does not. It's more than reasonable to debate the frameworks for IP, such as how long it should last (be it fixed term or dynamic terms with ever increasing renewals required), what exceptions should be made, etc. But if you've got a steep hill to climb if you want to claim IP should be done away with. It'd help if you could even posit a better way to direct resources, keeping in mind the failures of the past. It'd help even more if you could point to anyone developing valuable information better without IP, which right now you cannot. China hacking into places to take it vs developing itself certainly doesn't help you there.

I think he's trying to say that there could be an argument made for catching China up to the rest of the world, so that they can spend their resources innovating on new things, not just trying to get caught up.

It's not hard to see how that would be a net benefit for the world (except of course for the Western IP holders).

Please don't think I'm supporting this, just trying to see this side of the argument.

I think we'd be better off with a system that promotes free flow of information, but local production of goods and services. Products shouldn't be available without full specifications and fabrication methods. Web services shouldn't exist without interoperability protocols and source code. I think this would be a hackers' paradise, and this is "Hacker News", after all.

Upvote. This is a very interesting alternative take on globalization vs protectionism I'd love to hear from Hacker News, even if it may be impractical.

Perhaps something close to what you've described is LibreSilicon [0], a free and open source semiconductor manufacturing process (only 1 micrometer though) currently in development.

[0] https://libresilicon.com/

The US famously did the "catch up and then leap fast" thing, which worked out great for the US, and probably less bad for the rest of the world than if Germany had won WWII or the Soviet Union had been more dominant.

Hard for me to feel that all that influence over the next century going to the particular flavor of country that is modern China is gonna be good for the rest of the world, though.

But, interestingly, that's not an IP-related argument, that's a political system one.

Like a stronger military?

I agree, it's quite possibly a huge mistake to treat information as though it was property.

By "different principles", you presumably mean totally in the service of an autocratic, hegemonistic nation bent on the brutal oppression its own citizens and its rise to become an unchallengeable global power able to curtail the social, political and human rights of anybody, anywhere on Earth, who it deems an enemy?

>... curtail the social, political and human rights of anybody, anywhere on Earth.

FTFY. CCP’s objective here isn’t limited to enemies only.

These sorts of comments are what make most online discussions about China seem so out of touch.

If I told you that most people in China generally support the government and don't feel oppressed by it, how would that affect your worldview? Most people in China are primarily concerned with improving their standard of living. For hundreds of millions of people, that standard has improved more than you can probably imagine in the last 30 or so years. That's what they care about.

Sure, they get upset when they hear about governmental corruption, or when wages aren't paid, and young people even care about internet censorship (though they all have VPNs). But if you were to go to them and propose overthrowing the government, most people would be horrified. They don't want chaos. They think that would put the enormous gains in social welfare they've achieved at risk. They want a competent government that delivers economic growth, and maybe some day in the future slowly - gradually - opens up political life.

Why should it be the least bit difficult to imagine that the average Chinese citizen is not remarkably concerned about their government's curtailment of civil liberties? Cultural differences between China and the Western world are not insignificant. The average Chinese citizenry might not feel particularly oppressed, or be receptive to western views of authoritarianism. I've made the acquaintance of many Chinese nationals throughout my professional and academic life, and in my experience their views on such topics as authoritarianism, the role of the individual in society, the significance of individuality, egalitarianism, civil disobedience and civil liberties ( among other things ) tend to differ widely from their western counterparts. Although I'm aware it's dangerous to make assumptions, I do presume that there is some bias in my observations here. The Chinese nationals I am exposed to might be more likely to hold ( or at very least be exposed to and familiar with ) cosmopolitain, westernised views than their countrymen due to having had encountered them living in the western world. I don't doubt that there are a very large number of people in the Chinese diaspora with widely divergent and pro-Western views, but in my experience they have been a small minority.

For fairly obvious reasons, "look the other way at the government's indiscretions in exchange for raising per-capita GDP to ~10k USD" isn't an appealing bargain for anyone in the developed world.

We're not talking about the developed world. We're talking about a country whose GDP/capita was $300 just 30 years ago. For citizens of that country, increasing GDP/capita to $10k (a factor of 30) and looking the other way on various political issues is an appealing bargain. It doesn't take that much imagination to empathize with that view, which in my experience is shared by many (I'd say most) Chinese people.

It continually amazes me how little effort people make in Western online discussions to put themselves in the shoes of someone who's seen their country go from utter poverty to relative wealth in one generation. That person might want to gain more political freedoms eventually, but they mainly don't want to destroy everything by plunging the country into chaos.

Keep in mind that the catastrophic experience of the Cultural Revolution soured many Chinese people to politics, and convinced them that stability and steady improvement of living standards are the most important things. Many people who remember those times are allergic to any sort of fanaticism.

Also keep in mind that although many things are restricted in China, the country has opened up a huge amount. In contrast to how things were not so long ago, Chinese people are now able to travel around the world, and largely live their lives without experiencing much government interference. The limits on political activism are clear, but most people just focus on improving their own situation and enjoying the modest luxuries they can now finally afford.

In a way, it’s a type of “first world privilege.”

It’s often inconceivable for them to understand because their life experiences are just so different. Ask anyone from a poor nation about China, and while they may dislike the government, they also talk with admiration at how many people were lifted out of poverty.

it is an appealing bargain, sadly, if you replace 10k with a more reasonable number

that seemed to worked well for Saudi Arabia, a country which has far more human right abuses and you never see the kind of propaganda we are seeing against the Chinese.

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