U.S. needs to work with Europe to slow China's innovation rate, Raimondo says | Hacker News Reader

U.S. needs to work with Europe to slow China's innovation rate, Raimondo says

cnbc.com

9 pointsfspeech11 comments

the headline "innovation rate" and the article body "IPR theft" don't really mesh. Does china do rampant IPR theft? Yes. Without over-doing it, a lot of state actors do things which are completely antithetical to their treaty obligations all the time. The US and Europe are no exceptions, if they don't do this in IPR, it only partially offsets what they do in other ways to distort international trade.

China's actual innovation rate is pretty astronomical, IPR theft or not. I don't understand why anyone thinks the way to level a playing field is to stop other people innovating.

(if you think you can achieve IPR success solely by theft, you haven't paid attention: the B29 "chinese copy" the Soviets made in WW2 copied even faulty assembly holes, for fear of failure. It took real innovation to make airframes like the MIG jet series which took them head-to-head in combat. Theft of VLSI won't replace actual innovation in how to lay down fine structure, and China has been doing fundamental physics in Optics and materials science for a long time now)

Where's the innovation in US nuclear energy? Yes, they tried thorium reactors decades ago. Do US nuclear industry types think the chinese thorium reactor will simply replay the 1960s?

MiG is a Russian manufacturer?

They meant MiG was an example of real innovation from the USSR and copying alone, in the bomber case, wasn't innovation.

Ok, that makes sense

Yep. The Rolls-Royce "Nene" jet engine was sold under licence to the USSR and when the cold war broke out, the USSR cancelled the non-compete and worked the design up to develop the engine for the MIG-15.

So, to be fair to the other point of view, the "birth" of their jet engine technology was IPR theft in the cold war. it wasn't spying, they just broke contract but boy: they took it to another level.

What do you mean "not mesh"? It is a direct quote from the commerce secretary. The quote is in the second paragraph, not just the title.

The commerce secretary mis-spoke. if they think "stop innovating" is how the US and Europe catch up with China.

If the commerce secretary wants to stop IPR theft, don't say "stop innovating"

I'm not accusing the OP of mangling the title/body - I'm accusing the commerce secretary of being bloody stupid.

She is talking to Europeans about export control. This is the government strategy going forward. It's not about IPR. She meant what she said.

It is entirely about IPR. Did you read the article?

“They’re ripping off our IP, they are not playing by the rules. It’s not a level playing field. And so we need to hold their feet to the fire to make sure that they do that,” she added

and

“We have to work with our European allies to deny China the most advanced technology so that they can’t catch up in critical areas like semiconductors,” Raimondo said, adding that the Biden administration plans to deepen cooperation with Europe on export controls.

“We want to work with Europe, to write the rules of the road for technology, whether it’s TikTok or artificial intelligence or cyber,” she said.

What do you think "export control" means? Its about IP(R)

If you have problem understanding you can ask. No need to be rude. Export control means denial of sales for noneconomic reasons. Ie it is about giving up the right to profit from the IPs concerned.

This is my primary take re: advancements like TikTok as well. Everybody I know keeps going on and on about how great the TikTok algorithm is, and you can't really say they stole that from some other place because it handily beats them all. China has rampant academic abuse but some universities like Tsinghua are churning out top-tier engineers. I feel like long-term the US's best bet is to be more open to skilled Chinese immigrants working in the US, because I have no doubts that elite Chinese engineers would jump ship for much higher pay and more freedom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com