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Comment by mountainb | Hacker News Reader

We don't have jurisdiction over China. There is no such thing as IP theft across state lines without both states agreeing to recognize it as such. Even among countries that do recognize it, it's an insane kludge of treaty and the independent operation of fundamentally incompatible legal systems which can only reach within states themselves and tend to bump into serious obstacles whenever they try to reach across state lines.

Most major corporations deal with this by just registering IP in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously and litigating internationally, which can also be done in China just as you would do it in France or the UK. Redundancy is easier to manage than cross-border cooperation with foreign court orders.

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>There is no such thing as IP theft across state lines

That may be true in the strictest legal sense when a Chinese company is the one doing the stealing from a Western corporation. But in reality, that's so laughably incorrect that it makes me question why you said it.

Exactly. And to put it in clearer terms, they have been continuously hacking into Western companies for 20 years and stealing design schematics and counterfeiting them. I'm sure you'd be cool with a Chinese APT rooting your servers and stealing all that you have in your company?

It's a simple statement of fact that the United States has no jurisdictional authority over the actions Chinese citizens take in China against American citizens and vice versa. This is a serious problem for reasons such as this, but you cannot refute it as a basic statement of reality.

Put simply, American courts have no authority over Chinese in China, Chinese courts have no authority over Americans in the US, and our courts do not cooperate reciprocally as they do in other countries with alternative diplomatic and legal relations.

> Put simply, American courts have no authority over Chinese in China

Fortunately, this is of no significant barrier.

It is not a barrier because we, in the US, can ban their hardware anyways, and cause serious economic damage to them anyway.

So it doesn't particularly matter if we use IP law itself, in the courts, against china, when we have other options, such as simply banning their products in this other way.

To do this the US would have to reset its entire diplomatic and trade posture with China. Despite all the rhetoric this isn't happening; the diplobureaucrats will be kicking that can for as long as they possibly can.

> To do this the US would have to reset its entire diplomatic and trade posture with China

No we wouldn't. Literally we are commenting in an article, about what I am suggesting is happening.

So the stuff that the article says is already happening, is what I suggested.

Could it go faster? Maybe. But like I said, we are literally commenting on an article, about how US telecoms are being required to replace certain equipment.

In essence, it's not theft because they can get away with it.

The US has jurisdiction over things imported to the US, and apparently over network equipment used in exchanges.

To my knowledge this has not previously been used as punishment for theft of trade secrets (Hwawei was sanctioned for doing business in Iran), but the legal mechanism is there.

My understanding is that many Western firms had willingly entered into business agreements with Chinese firms, primarily for manufacturing but also for access to the Chinese market. It was always understood that such agreements included technology transfer, even if that wasn't always communicated to e.g. shareholders of Western firms. Not all Western firms entered such agreements, but those who did can't very well start crying about "hacking" now. When you tell someone a way to make money, they're going to remember that.

Because the two countries do not share definitions on what that even means. They both have to agree and both need a set procedure for adjudicating such disputes for it to be real. If the US says it's "IP theft" and China disagrees, there is a dispute on the legality of the act in question.

So for example, in France, there are many acts which are trademark infringement in France that are not trademark infringement in the US. A Frenchman can accuse an American of trademark infringement for an act that is not trademark infringement in the United States, but is infringement in France. They can bring a lawsuit in France, win, and potentially enforce that judgment on assets in the US with the cooperation of an American court despite the fact that the American did not, by the definitions of American law, infringe on anyone's intellectual property.

There are no such cooperative arrangements between the US and China despite recent attempts to set them up. There are also only limited agreements on what is and what isn't permitted.

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