Chinese company that stole IP from ASML raises $140M
bits-chips.nl
bits-chips.nl
Put aside the idea that they are going to co-operate with an IP system explicitly being wielded to cripple their growth. That was always unlikely. The real question here is whether history will even see them as acting immorally. The legitimacy of IP law is supposed to be that it encourages human progress, not acts as a geopolitical weapon to stop 20% of the human population from getting uppity and competing with the US army.
The problem the West has in this battle is that places with lax IP laws have a real chance to pull ahead with superior innovation. The only point in our favour is that poor IP property rights are linked to poor physical property rights. If the Chinese government could get the lesson through its thick skull that letting people own physical property was a good idea then they'd be completely unstoppable. But that is is a separate thing to IP law. Ditching most of IP law is a good idea.
If I owned property, I'd rather be living in the west.
Lots of this occurred for bridges, rail, cities, etc.
Of course I don't believe everyone was very willingly to relocate but most people got a good deal for that. I don't think that project would happen on anybody anytime soon again.
Here is a reference for a 250,000,000 forced migration goal by the CCP, maybe I underestimated: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-u...
I meant it was a mega infrastructure project. Do you have any specific data?
This can’t happen with new innovations requiring risky capital investments because of first mover disadvantage.
China can afford to act against IP law because they don’t care to be a first mover, the West can’t afford because the economy is now based around being first mover.
In terms of scale, maybe. But, as they say, "China has the world's poorest Chinese people." Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong (for example) have much higher standards of living than the PRC, despote starting from more or less the same low level in 1900
If Chinese didn't copy things like STM32, many businesses would be bankrupt now.
The problem is that often manufacturers only care about big customers and view SMEs as nuisance, that's where China comes in.
Also I'm in favour of not calling it shortages, but "price gauges bonanza" as that is what it is essentially. Have you tried to buy a real fpga recently? Yes, many types are available, but the prices....
It is not really that surprising, if the only thing that kept prices in check was cheap competition from China and that competition was practically killed off by their own gov. Why would remaining companies not monetise this new market conditions by increasing prices?
There is another aspect - Military Indistrial Complexes waking up around the world - and those under sanctions especially, buy MCUs and other parts from regular channels creating those shortages. For instance STM32F7 and H7 that are well used for control boards in drones and other military equipment are still unobtainium and unfortunately Chinese have not managed to clone them yet.
> Why would remaining companies not monetise this new market conditions by increasing prices?
Some product prices indeed are going up.
I do expect to get downvoted by US haters.
How that makes you feel about the US — or about thievery's morality and place in history — is an exercise left to the reader. But I think that's a fair read of the history.
The main thing that allowed American innovation is the fact that they are not under threat of a land or sea invasion due to the geography. This always gave them an advantage of being able to think long-term without being worried about war destroying their efforts.
Don't get me wrong - I am an immigrant to the U.S., and the U.S. is a great and successful country with many opportunities for all. The three things you mention certainly play a role in its success, but they're not the only factors by far.
I'm not a US hater at all, I think it's an amazing country, but it's also a great example of how to build one.
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/07/30/ip_thef...
However there is no evidence that the Chinese company stole any IP from ASML, and certainly there has been no court case or finding of fact suggesting that the Chinese company is using the stolen IP. The offense committed by the Chinese company is hiring the employee of the American company who continued to use IP that was sold to ASML.
> employee of the American company who continued to use IP
> that was sold to ASML.
In the except above, you've described the means by which the company stole the IP and is using the IP illegally. How can you possibly believe that the company didn't steal IP after writing this? Did you forget a word/sentence/paragraph that explains this obvious contradiction?
So do you really believe this or is this just an anti-China thing? Fun Fact: Many innovators in Silicon valley did the exact same thing, discovering something at one company, and then taking it to another where it was more fully developed. They then went on to continue to innovate completely new things. And sometimes there were lawsuits flying around about who stole which IP, yet the same workers continued to be hired by tech companies, and people didn't automatically assume that anyone who hired them subsequently was participating in IP theft.
I guarantee you that former Uber self-driving engineers are still gainfully employed, many in the field of self-driving cars, and no one is accusing their new employers of trying to steal IP from Google.
How do you justify applying this double standard?
Is it not obvious what the line is here? Don't give IP that isn't yours to companies that hire you. It doesn't matter if its from your memory or files that you copied and physically moved with you. This individual did not follow this obvious rule. If you can't do your job without stealing IP, then your job is criminal.
> However there is no evidence that the Chinese company stole any IP from ASML
You referenced the chinese company hiring the person with the sentence
> In the except above, you've described the means by which the company stole the IP and is using the IP illegally. How can you possibly believe that the company didn't steal IP after writing this?
This seems to me that you propose the person being hired by a company is proof enough of the chinese company actually using this technology.
(The company accused and fined for IP violation was an american company employing the person in question.)
As a contractor I waive the rights to the code I write and any associated documentation BUT it's explicitly stated in my contract that I am entitled to use the general, technical know-how I acquired during the project how I wish.
The spirit is that it's unreasonable to expect from me to pretend I don't know how to approach problems I've been solving all this time.
Really it's a mess, because of course you are going to take your experience and knowledge with you. Bottom line, those employees are finally free of ASML after the legal settlement with the XTAL lawsuit, and have no contract with them that they can be accused of violating, and so they can go work for whomever they want. If the new employer violates an ASML patent, then ASML can go after the employer like anyone else. But who these employees work for isn't ASML's concern anymore.
So, if there is research, how many chinese papers get attacked by chinese researchers, and thus retracted? If nobody calls it out, can there even be a replication crisis.
Now if all there is, is faked surface. What worth are all those agreements, all thos archievements and hailed green revolutions? What if all there is, is a great PR-campaign poster - and behind that.. nothing.
Welcome to the desert behind stalins blooming landscape posters.
Eastasia (CN+RU) No recognition/local only
Oceania + Eurasia TRIPS
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
To be clear, I am not making a moral argument, just a practical one. Did people really expect the CCP to just shrug and say "I guess we will be entirely reliant on Taiwan/Netherlands for top quality silicon. Including all military and research applications. And we will just accept whatever embargoes they (and America) decide"?
Their hostility and theft is not based on the embargo. They are thieves to begin with.
If they changed, the limits would be removed. But we know the CCP won't change.
I look forward to the day this chinese criminal fucks up and interpol catches his commie ass.
Nah, this is exactly what Japan did post-WWII until they didn't anymore. You copy until you catch up. Once you've caught up, you innovate. There's nothing fundamental that will hold China back.
There are even benefits to authoritarianism - for instance Chinese infrastructure is in many cases far better than US infrastructure and built far more efficiently. The US has about 49.9 miles of high-speed rail while China built 25,000 miles in the last few years. They've even got maglev trains. We've got the diesel Caltrain (for now! electrification is finally happening). [edit] (And soon the Bakersfield-Merced Express - stopping at every cow paddock along the way). The PRC built a bridge from Hong Kong to Macau, 34mi long, and built islands along the way to support it.
Never underestimate your opponent!
I don't see how that can be explained by authoritarianism. All you've arguably shown is that today China is more efficient at building out infrastructure than the US.
It’s must more efficient to build where there was nothing before than build where there is already something. Even China faced this issue with Three Gorges which took then decades just to get started.
However, I think it's also worth mentioning since you call out the 1940-1980 period, that a lot of that infrastructure was built thanks to, to my knowledge, the federal Declaration of Taking Act, 1931.
It was put on the books to enable faster confiscation of land for public use by the government. Unlike state eminent domain laws, the federal law gives the government the right to take the land first, tell you to vacate immediately, and have the courts set a price later. The government acquired land area under the declaration of taking act roughly the size of South Carolina (20 million acres). [1]
Meaningful infrastructure projects require setting aside individual rights for the collective good, and in the last few decades the US lost its taste for doing so. Now even building a basic over-land high-speed train is a morass of litigation and whining which balloons costs, reduces state capacity and leads to ridiculous compromises.
In my opinion it's not a question of whether theres "something there" or not - there's nothing in the Central Valley or along either the I-5 or the CA-99 corridor of any particular note. Building along it efficiently requires some authoritarian land-taking that the US has long since lost its taste for, despite having the capacity to carry out.
Many today would consider collecting 20M acres of land, telling people to get off, and eventually paying them out some amount set by the courts to be an act of authoritarian government imposition on private land incompatible with a western liberal democracy. In my opinion it's silly that one dude's cow paddock and one dude's fear it might make some toads sad can hold up high-speed rail between the two of the biggest economic powerhouses in the world.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/enrd/history-federal-use-eminent-dom...
The network as a whole is deep in the red and it accumulated $ 1T of debt, alot of which was underwritten by the local governments. Because the fares are so high, most chinese cannot afford the high speed trains and they instead use the slower service. In essence local taxpayers are subsidizing the high speed journeys of the rich.
Contrast this with Germany, where sure buildout is slow and >250km/h sections are rare, but all train operators combined only have something like 5B € in debt and the high speed sections are about break-even.
Infra net benefit goes beyond basic balance sheet math, no serious analysis suggest US high way system or 1T infrastructure bill to get US infra unfucked a massive waste. The purpose of infra is to generate more economic activity than it consumes. Analysis of net benefit of PRC HSR a few years ago was ~400B, or ROI of ~7%. It's a solid investment. The other context is PRC pop concentration of 1.3B east of Heihe–Tengchong Line, denser the closer to coast, where military aviation gets priority due to proximity of neighbours makes mass civilian air travel not feasible - HSR is replacing capacity for air travel not slow rail. Imagine if all US aviation, military and commercial are biased towards one coast to the point where capacity to move bodies becomes functionally saturated. Hence the joke that once PRC reunites with TW, they can afford to push military aviation further out from coast and then civilian aviation (notorious for delays in mainland) wouldn't be such a shitshow. Also why it's not useful to contrast to Germany since connecting requirements for a long trip (i.e. 600km Berlin-Munich) in a small country is different from long trip (i.e. 1500km Beijing-Shanghai) in a large country. Ultimately, PRC HSR is impressive reflection of CCP state capacity because it's not just about laying down fuckload of tracks, but being able to politically realize enormous projects for the right reasons.
Also for reference this entire idiotic PRC HSR boondoggle narrative was popularized by Indian nationalists after PRC nationalists made fun of them for not being able to build HSR, then amplified by customary western PRC bad bubbles.
His reply: "yes, but they're the sort of communists who all dream of becoming millionaires."
All economies are different. But some are more different than others.
Apparently the latter proved to be more flexible in the long run.
My father happened to attend a meeting once that turned out to be a propaganda event for Chinese communism - they gave him Mao's red book, which was promptly confiscated by security services who were standing in the exit.
No other consequences, just an unsaid, stern warning that the only accepted form of communism in this soviet satellite state is the one from Moscow.
Germany made significant technological progress from 1933 to 1945. They threw away their early lead in computing after the war, maybe not too unsurprising given the circumstances.
But I also think China deserves some credit for mastering the 95% approach to product development, which is now even infecting western companies.
The Chinese strategy is clearly a race to the bottom and they seem to be winning. Things like safety standards and reliability are mostly a burden if you are shoveling out to a market of consumers willing to buy anything if the price is low enough. Stealing is obviously far cheaper then R&D, which means just another market advantage.
Democracy and the rule of law looks like chaos in the eyes of strongman. " Let some strong iron man rule us, screw human rights". You get: Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Putin, Xi, you name it.
Make no mistake, the tendency to have yearn for someone to fix the country is very human. We can talk about Trump for days, but he was chosen because he appeals to exactly that idea. To be honest, I had misjudged Trump myselves early on too.
We have to be honest with each other: in American politics there have always been a current that strives in the direction of an autocracy. It is backed by some of the most wealthy conservatives, they seem to look at the Russian oligarchic model as an inspiration, it seems. Not illogical, as for those select few people, the law, the trias polica, human rights and those things we collectively obtained after centuries of struggle are just brakes on their quest for more power.
That political gremium is successful in diverting attention from what they are aiming at. People are now convinced they should be afraid of transgenders and Mexicans it seems. Why? Because the support of conservatism is crucial for implementing the overthrow of democracy.
Meanwhile the self-coup on the Witehouse was almost successful. The Republican Party has been taken over by people that don't believe in democracy. If you know you have lost the elections, but instead you declare the democracy dead by telling the people they shouldn't trust it, you have given a very clear signal about where things are heading.
I fear many Americans live in denial, because it sounds too extreme. We should remember that Hitler did not win the elections in the Weimar Republic. We are getting used to more and more extremism and corporatism, which paves the way to anacracy -> autocracy+oligarchy. But apparently we have to learn that lesson every century. Getting rid of non-democratic elements usually takes lots of blood. The Ukranians can tell you something about that. As do the Iranians.
Keep dictatorship away with a large middle class, education, decouple journalism from corporate interests [1], trias politica (esp seperation of law making and jurisdiction!) [2], consequence culture, keeping wealth concentration in check, making any political donations punishable by life sentence and hefty trade barriers for autocratic regimes.
You see, those are good things for society and horrible things for the few.
________
1) In a case Fox News defended themselves (case of Tuckerson) in court that they could not be convicted as it should be blatantly obvious that they were not telling the truth all the time.
2) See the supreme court of the train wrecks you get when you don't have this in place.
> In 1985, China acceded to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, followed by the Patent Cooperation Treaty in 1994. When China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, it became a member of the TRIPS agreement.
Here, an actual IP theft (as in "files on a USB stick") is involved. Not just violating patents.
"Article 42 The duration of an invention patent shall be twenty years, the duration of the patent for a utility model or design shall be ten years, counted from the date of application." [1][2]
[1] http://mg.mofcom.gov.cn/article/policy/201910/20191002905592...
[2] http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c30834/202011/82354d98e70947c09dbc...