Prediction: The lawsuit will be prosecuted and resolved in favor of Tesla.
More likely, China will simply steal Tesla's technology, share it with domestic manufacturers, and tell Tesla to swallow their medicine or leave the market, like they've done with every other foreign manufacturer that tried to dictate terms.
China has been buttering up Tesla to make it easier to steal the technology by convincing then to move a huge portion of their manufacturing and process research into China.
Nations that provide for their citizens by enabling them to reach their full economic potential will have an advantage over nations that have to buy the labor and output of another country. Skills and knowledge gaps are consequences of investment gaps on the individual level and cause productivity and capital gaps on the national level. International actors appear as countervailing and prevailing forces that create the conditions for a market solution but also encourage territoriality and IP protection schemes as well as other kinds of schemes regarding other people’s intellectual property.
Part of me feels disconnected from this whole argument. I would download a car. I don’t feel bad and I don’t think anyone should for feeling that way. Culture is free. If you didn’t want the world to know about it and use it you shouldn’t have shared your creation, knowledge, invention, or property with society by allowing them to legally acquire it. First sale doctrine and interoperability exceptions to copyright law are clear on this. If I buy a self-driving car, and get the title, it’s really, actually, legally my car now. If I can figure out how my car’s self-driving system works without violating any of the car vendor’s computers, that is my right to do so in order to adapt the car to my needs and desires. Provided I don’t interfere with or prevent the normal operation of the vendor’s computers this should be entirely legal. It is legal to modify the operation of the computers in the cars I own.
Writ large this means China will get their self-driving cars once the first people do because they will be in line buying them like everyone else. Then they will clone the tech just like everyone else. I don’t see what the big deal is besides all the money everyone feels they should be making and conversely all of the money to be saved by making your own system or cloning another. Like all displacement goods it will just take over the market and create a new one where self-driving is an implicit assumption of every car interaction and purchasing decision. It’s just so valuable a technology it won’t be possible to properly control it through traditional means if at all.
All of this is why I think the secret sauce of higher level self-driving to be a very real brass ring, that once snatched, will be hidden behind a velvet rope. It will be licensed and controlled remotely, not owned and operated by the end user and simply mediated by the car offline. I would expect future cars to have always online functionality to enable self-driving functionality checks simply for road safety reasons and also to deter IP leakage via encrypted firmware and remotely validated automatic updates. It will be interesting to see if any kind of open source challenger will appear in such a future. I hope we all get to see it sooner rather than later.
I see this come up on HN from time to time. How would you feel if a large company made millions of dollars on your open source project, and never gave anything back in return?
"Culture is free. If you didn’t want the world to know about it and use it you shouldn’t have shared your creation, knowledge, invention, or property with society by allowing them to legally acquire it."
This has very dangerous implications. If we have no intellectual property rights, large companies could just wait until small startups came out with a good idea..and it could be ripped off and copied. It only pushes us towards a world that's controlled by a couple of large corporations and governments.
"If I can figure out how my car’s self-driving system works without violating any of the car vendor’s computers, that is my right to do so in order to adapt the car to my needs and desires"
We aren't talking about reverse-engineering a car that you buy (which is legal). We are talking about an employee exfiltrating source code and other proprietary documents to be used at a competing company.
"Then they will clone the tech just like everyone else."
Sure, but who wants to be the first person to market and spend billions of dollars on R&D when you can just clone it after some other company does all of the hard work for you?
Another reason why we need IP laws is that innovation is actually stifled without them. China is a good example of this. I can't think of one thing innovative that came out of China in decades. Most are cheap (and many times worse) copies of technology from more innovative countries.
It reminds me of the current state of new drugs. The majority of new drugs are created in the US and are then cloned and sold for a much cheaper cost to countries with socialized medicine...mostly because they don't have to do any of the expensive R&D/clinical trials to get the drug to market.
"I would expect future cars to have always online functionality to enable self-driving functionality checks simply for road safety reasons and also to deter IP leakage via encrypted firmware and remotely validated automatic updates. It will be interesting to see if any kind of open source challenger will appear in such a future"
This is where most software has gone in the last decade (from download and install a copy to SAAS), so it makes sense.
But based on my talk with my friends in Shanghai Auto, and LandRover China (with Geely), the Chinese government pretty much are going to keep Tesla in China as the Catfish in the muddy water. The theory is to have a strong predator to force the weaker players to die and stronger to learn.
The government learned that the organizational structure inside Chinese domestic firms are not going to provide the soil for creative work.
Tesla is treated like a teacher, but they are not touched, as that defeat the whole purpose of having a strong predator in the market.
You might disagree, but I guarantee that Chinese government is not blind to where it needs to learn.