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Comment by StingyJelly | Hacker News Reader

It might be that in China there's not a strong opensource culture. Here's a video from Naomi Wu dragging umidigy into compliance where she talks about the issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ

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Chinese culture doesn’t respect intellectual property in general, why would they treat open source licenses any differently?

The USA is a signatory to the Madrid Treaty Protocol governing international intellectual property rights, but never bothered to ratify it. What might a different country who has bothered to ratify the treaty and been subjected to litigation and trade enbargos at the behest of America maybe think about the behavioral example? There's just one example of a international famous trademark enforcement against American interests which is Societé Des Bains De Mer, the owners of the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco in the 9th District in 2001. Just that solitary case of reciprocal enforcement.

Those computers took a fairly significant effort to design, source components, and run through manufacturing. You'd think at some point they'd be self aware enough that the open source they're adulterating also required similar levels of gratis effort and should be afforded some respect.

If you looking into Chinese culture [1][2], it is astonishingly autocratic. Creativity is frowned on, and criticizing superiors is nearly impossible. There is a very strong "do what is asked, no questions" attitude. Business has very strong "nothing matters once I have your money" policy. I took South East Asian history in college, and Chinese culture is abundantly self-sabotaging. It was morbidly fascinating, which is why I took several courses on it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza [2] https://www.youtube.com/@laowhy86

> Business has very strong "nothing matters once I have your money" policy.

Western business now has adopted "nothing matters once I got your personal data" policy though. It seems that "nothing matters" policy is not restricted to Asia.

Opening up to China has not made that country more Western, it could be argued it has made the world more Chinese.

See also: VCs talking glowingly about how "productive" 996 makes Chinese companies and how US employees should be working similar hours to keep up.

Greed knows no national boundaries, and the societal norms that kept it somewhat under control in the West are being rapidly eroded.

I cringe when I see the term "Western" vis-a-vis countries in East Asia. How does it sound if we say "modern"? That sounds better to me. Why? Then, it includes Korea, Japan, and Taiwan -- all very modern, but not at all "Western".

I agree with your sentiment, but the collective delusion to open up to China was not an attempt to make it more modern. It truly was an attempt to westernize it. In the colonial, racist sense. The Allied powers wanted to westernize Japan and Korea as well after the second world war.

Makes me wonder how much innovation would the west see again if only we got rid of IP lawyers

Case law, at least in England and Wales, is on the side of whoever makes something out of disused or dormant designs and patents. The equitable ruling will always be made in favour of the technical infringer paying a reasonable royalty provided that use and application does not harm the rights owner.

What makes you think this is related to “chinese culture” as opposed to “circumstance”? Without qualification it looks like a great demonstration of the fundamental attribution error [0] and a very fashionable position to have in today’s western world.

0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_erro...

I see a section with short vertical videos on Youtube that strongly resembles a certain Chinese mobile app. Could it be that those Chinese developers, not respecting intellectual property, are now working for Youtube?

Or maybe not respecting intellectual property when it is profitable is just a worldwide tradition?

Copying an idea is one thing. Outright stealing source code is on different level. i.e. See how Huawei got big - By copying hardware of Cisco routers and loading there Cisco firmware.

You can always check out the Huawei Github, here's some very interesting LTE modem firmware sources :

https://github.com/Huawei-LTE-routers-mods/README

You’re right, it reminds me of Silicon Valley’s Vine. Or is that not what you meant?

I remember seeing this name but never heard of anyone using it. So I don't think that Youtube would copy an unpopular app.

YouTube Shorts is a clone of Musical.ly (now rebranded as TikTok) which was a clone of Vine.

I remember seeing that the main activity or whatever it was of the YouTube app was called something like “YoutubeTiktokApplication”

That wasn’t the exact name, I’ll try to find it, but it definitely had TikTok in the name

I could also be wrong here because I was trying to patch it with ReVanced or something at the time so it could be related to the patcher

I’m not saying that means they’re copying TikTok’s source code but it’s just an odd thing I wanted to share

Someone downvoted me, it does sound odd but I think it was true, here’s someone else seeing the same thing:

https://twitter.com/imShreyasPatil/status/132039916265180364...

However someone said this: “Tiktok is an internal component in Google used by many of the apps, it was written and named like that before the social network existed and is absolutely unrelated.”

What's missing is the culture of respecting other nations' IP, on both commercial level and individual level. Their laws on enforcing IP are practically unilateral in the context of intl. relations.

A way to test the hypotheses are, check if Chinese companies generally respect other Chinese companies IP? Seems like that would be the most convenient to copy, so if they DO respect their peers then it IS targeted at foreign people.

Don't forget Rule of Acquisition #17.

I’ve always wondered if the Ferengi were based on the Chinese

Well... some have speculated differently. https://gamerant.com/star-trek-ferengi-anti-semitic-stereoty...

so what happens when chinese investors discover patent trolling and start purchasing western IP portfolios to sue american and european companies over in western courts? and what if they start winning?

"wait, no, not like that"

What happens when western government will demand level playing field regarding IP, either by China upholding the IP protection, or by West dropping all the IP protection of Chinese companies?

> West dropping all the IP protection of Chinese companies

what IP? don't they just steal everything?

And that's going to be exact reasoning to get this level playing field going.

so in other words, the state of things being how they are, is the reason they are going to be different?

this is amazingly devoid of any meaning, even for the dumb smart people on HN.

Can you give an example of powerful country that respects other nations?

Is this a stupid trick question where, if I respond with a list of nations not known to engage in industrial espionage and IP theft, you respond by saying "well country X once did something-unrelated-to-this-topic to country Y, so your argument falls flat"?

I'll humor you. Germany and France are not known to engage in systematic industrial espionage and IP theft. Not towards China, not towards European peers, not towards the USA. Please don't move the goalpost by talking about France' colonial epoch and stay away from WW2 and Hitler.

Even French media would disagree with that

https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio...

Austinites have joked about the French Ligation being a spy base for 50 years.

That's weird, I've lived in Austin a long time and never heard that. Not saying you're wrong, though I am curious where you heard that? I'm also generally curious about bits of obscure local history.

You're not wrong in the general case, but France does/did a lot of industrial espionage in recent history

Can you give a few examples on this? France is not known for industrial espionage so your claim is the counter to the common narrative

My knowledge of this comes pretty much entirely from non-public sources (namely American graybeard incident responders), but here are a few I dug up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#France_an...

https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-france-leads-russia-c...

https://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/france-intellectual-p...

Hmmm where might have they learned that strategy? [1][2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution_in_the...

So the argument is somewhere someone did it before we had international conventions and agreed upon bylaws like WTO, etc., but nevermind, someone some time ago did it, so it's okay?

Indentured servitude is still openly practiced in some countries, so that would make it okay for every country to do it now? Amazing!

I believe the problem is that it's expected of a developing nation, but once a nation is considered developed it's looked down on. Similar to a person acting childish when an adult. China want's to have their cake and eat it too in almost everything, it's "look how powerful we are, how strong our economy", until it's time to respect patents then it's "no we are still developing, you can't hold that against us".

It’s because China has two faces which are often being viewed simultaneously by foreigners and locals alike. It wants to project peace through power outwardly and put on its best diplomatic display but internally they are training their children to want to kill Americans.

> internally they are training their children to want to kill Americans.

histronics

You can say that again. Yes, obviously these people sending their kids to communist army camps are histrionic but its the type of performance the CCP is looking for. I can send you sources if you aren't aware of what I am talking about.

Way to equate indentured servitude with copying. There's no arguing with such ridiculous histrionics.

people do not get that copying does not equate to stealing. The copyright trolls have done their work well.

Well, the argument is that these conventions are exploitative (copyright basically forever) and therefore do not have moral force. Also that certain countries used copying to go up the economic ladder and then kicked the ladder.

It didn't really look like dragging but more informing and asking(not being a jerk about it too). As she said, there wasn't resistance, just past inertia.

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