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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

This article is written from the standpoint that something is being lost, IP, to foreign governments. What I don’t see it saying is that something has been lost and/or stolen.

Science being funded across borders isn’t a bad thing. Collaboration leads to greater understanding and faster discoveries. The article doesn’t seem to mention any positives, only painting everything as shady back room dealings that need to be exposed. I’m curious if anyone in the science community has a more positive perspective than the one that’s being written about here? It seems to only mention China as the threat, but I see research is constantly shared with European universities. Will those also come under investigation?

Basically, are the issues brought up in the article actually bad things that we want to prevent? If these new policies are carried through, will we be better off or not?

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>Science being funded across borders isn’t a bad thing

Collaboration is the key word here.

This isn't science being funded across borders, this is research being stolen, such that the work is quickly finished off in China and published before the researchers in the US do, the thief and China getting all the credit to themselves and a bunch of knowledge at no cost.

The difference with the EU is that it is mutual, consensual collaboration with both sides putting in work and funding.

> this is research being stolen

Well, I guess copied would be a better word, as the people who "had the research" still has it.

> quickly finished off in China and published before the researchers in the US do

Sounds like they are doing a better job than US researchers then? Unless of course, they do a sloppy job finishing it, but then US researchers can just take their time, do it properly and people would use their research instead. Free market of research basically, just have to make sure your research is actually better.

That's not how research works. The first paper published is the important one; all others are derivative, and must prove novelty or improvement anew. And even if you do, you must cite the first paper published, and that's the one with the prestige associated with the citation count, not yours, which might even be overlooked. Simply being "more robust" is unlikely to be sufficiently novel for acceptance into a journal or conference.

This "free market" is similar to JK Rowling asking me to proofread her new Harry Potter book that is 95% finished. I take it and "finish" the last 5% and then publish it as my own book.

I honestly cannot understand this viewpoint that stealing private information is not only cool, but a good thing to do. I literally hear it only on hackernews and no where else in my life.

Userbase here is generally young and idealistic, most probably don't know how research works and apparently can't tell the difference between mutual co-operation and state-sanctioned plagiarism.

>This article is written from the standpoint that something is being lost, IP, to foreign governments.

The target here is China. They alone are responsible for the largest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen (Trillions $$ in IP theft from western tax payers). There is a great book called "Future Wars-Mark Goodman" that details some of this theft of technology that the Chinese Gov and their agents have carried out not just from the US but Europe also.

Taking IP is not a "wealth transfer"; it's wealth copying. The productive capacity of the original holder of the IP/technology is not decreased by someone else also having it, although their revenue might be. This is different from if I go and steal your factory, which prevents you from producing whatever you were using the factory to produce. Intellectual property and property are qualitatively different, and many people argue that society would be better off without the former (see for instance the massive support for SciHub and movie piracy on HN).

"Taking IP is not a "wealth transfer"" But it is, because you didn't need to invest the capital to gain the IP. You just stole it. It's rather easy to make a much cheaper product if you didn't have any R&D expenses.

>The productive capacity of the original holder of the IP/technology is not decreased by someone else also having it, although their revenue might be.

This is the contradiction. A reduction in revenue directly translates to a reduction in productive capacity.

Which makes us go down the slippery slope of "if I'm going to the toilet on my employer's time it means I'm reducing its revenues". Which in turn brings us to the employees of the most wealthy men on this planet having to literally piss themselves on the job.

It doesn't make us go down that slippery slope. Those who slide down it are deliberately choosing to do so.

So it's ok to go on the slippery slope of seeing IP infringement as theft (at least I regard that as a slippery slope, and I'm not the only one), but going further down the slippery slope thingie is not ok. So the question becomes: who decides where we should stop the slipper slope-ness?

Society, collectively.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm saying "why, this is simple, obvious to even the most casual of observers" -- what I'm saying is more that this is in line with the kind of decisions societies and individuals have to make all the time about what is and isn't acceptable.

I'm a fiction author myself, and I'm not against giving my work away for free! But I don't think it's unreasonable for me to think I should be the one to make the decision whether or not to do so -- and that means that, at some level, I need control over the "intellectual property" of my fiction. I don't think that having my work digitally available means I somehow automatically forfeit the right to that control that I would have had thirty years ago when you pretty much would have had to buy a physical copy on paper. What readers are ostensibly paying for, after all -- or what I'm giving away, if I choose -- isn't the medium, it's the work expressed in that medium.

And, you know, there are nuances and arguments to be made around that. There's a lot of things about IP law as it exists now I disagree with. But seriously making the argument that we can't let a book publisher enforce their copyright against a pirate ebook site because to do so will inexorably lead us to the Triangle Shirt Fire -- I'm just saying, I think that's a pretty damn hard case to make.

>Taking IP is not a "wealth transfer"; it's wealth copying.

Try "wealth division", by the very act of more people having access to the rights the earnings from its exploitation are distributed.

If I own the patent to the screw, I make all the money from its sale and use. There isn't more money created if you steal it and sell the plans to a hundred thousand fabricators who compete for the same and further markets.

That's not true in the case of creating new markets either geographically or catering to clients who would not be in the market otherwise. If you as the rights holder don't, won't, or refuse to capitalize on those opportunities otherwise, it makes no difference to your bottom line - or might even increase it due to additional advertising by third parties/network effects. In that case (which exists to some extent or another in many common scenarios), it is wealth multiplication.

>That's not true in the case of creating new markets either geographically or catering to clients who would not be in the market otherwise.

This is such a thieve's attitude, "what good is money sitting in this rich man's house unused, when I can create opportunities for all who I would spend it on?"

No it's not, I am just talking about a reality without judging it. Regardless, this is not money but copying of information, with some similarities and some differences which we would all do well to recognize.

If someone takes unpublished work for a paper, then uses all that unpublished as of yet work and publishes it, how is that "wealth copying". Its plagiarism as well as unethical, and it is indeed taking away the productive capacity of the person doing the original work.

Support for SciHub is orthogonal to this, these academic papers don't exist yet. So not even the Arxiv would make sense, its not even a preprint, its work in progress thats being co-opted and used for gain within China.

If you could explain how this state of affairs, aka upending the academic publishing model entirely by undermining the entire idea and using unpublished research for your own gain in another country, that would be a constructive way of addressing the issue at hand. As the issue at hand isn't directly economic, but it will affect economics at some point as money is involved.

I am under the understanding that the largest wealth transfer the world has ever seen was the various flavours of colonialism that have been practiced over the past few centuries. We are the beneficiaries of this sort of thing, and yet, we have forgotten all about it...

Incidentally, would you consider someone getting paid 1/10th what an American worker would need to get paid, to make a widget, to be wealth transfer? In which direction? To me, it seems to be a wealth transfer from the person employed in the sweatshop, to the west. [1] We have been enjoying the benefits of this sort of wealth transfer for the past four decades. I must say, hundreds of millions of people giving you their labour for next to nothing, for decades, dwarfs whatever impact IP has in, ah, transferring wealth.

[1] For some odd reason, a large number of modern politicians think that it is a wealth transfer in the other direction. I'm not sure they understand, or appreciate the fact that people on the other side of the world are willing to work for us, nearly for free.

Edit: Cleaned up the language.

You've got an important point here, but can you please not post it in the snarky flamewar style? It's against the site rules and degrades discussion. If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take their spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

If you post that way, you'll evoke better from others, instead of worse.

> China...alone are responsible for the largest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen (Trillions $$ in IP theft from western tax payers).

In terms of % of global GDP is it in fact greater than the transfer to the US of European technologies in the 18th and in particular 19th centuries (a famous IP theft being, for example, the spinning mill)? Or smuggled transplantation of crops between rival European empires (e.g. rubber from Brazil to to Malaya).

Not trying to defend or accuse anyone here; simply curious about the term "largest".

> The target here is China.

Welcome to the trade war.

> They alone are responsible for the largest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen (Trillions $$ in IP theft from western tax payers).

The largest transfer of wealth was either from china to europe/america ( opium wars ), colonialism in africa/india and the confiscation of land in the americas ( particularly the US ). If your assertion were true, china would be ruling the world and their economy would be bigger than US + EU combined. China's economy is only 1/3rd the size of US + EU while having 300 million more people. Not quite the largest of wealth transfers. Also, wealth transfers normally happen via war. Don't recall china winning a war recently.

Most European countries have been the US's strategic allies since at least WW2. China, meanwhile, is a strategic competitor to the United States. Why on earth would knowledge being shared with Europe have the same scrutiny applied?

The knowledge gets published and shared with everyone.

Not all knowledge gets published. In fact, the overwhelming majority of knowledge produced by these institutions - even ones whose goals are explicitly to publish - never sees publication.

This is in itself a problem that ought to be solved, but for the time being makes this argument void.

Sounds like we don't want to sell our education or knowledge to 'specific' groups we don't like at the moment, this list will be a ever evolving and changing landscape i'm sure:

"The success of the program in recruiting U.S.-trained scientists back to China has been viewed with concern from the U.S., with a June 2018 report from the National Intelligence Council declaring an underlying motivation of the program to be “to facilitate the legal and illicit transfer of US technology, intellectual property and know-how” to China." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program

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