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Comment by diogenes4 | Hacker News Reader

> People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis.

Back in my day this was called "competition" and worked for the consumer, not against them. I find the espionage factor to be theatrical hogwash trotted out by the corporate types. We americans love competition, right? Stfu and compete.

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You're missing a huge part of this: The "competition" you think you're referring to had, you know, actual rules. Sending people to get jobs at a rival, and steal all of their internal documents and trade secrets, is illegal in most countries.

Perhaps we should reframe how intellectual property works to make secrecy no longer desirable and allow industries that rely on "trade secrets" to realign naturally.

Perhaps (well.. almost certainly) that would disincentivize any of the companies in these industry from innovating at all (if you can’t gain any edge by additional investment since anything you do will be stolen you might as well start stealing if that cheaper).

This would also especially favor large mega corporations as long as they are efficient enough (due to obvious reasons).

Most substantial technological innovation is either funded by government grants or is publicly funded in some other way in the first place. It's a myth that IP laws protect innovation, they protect profits of corporations that add very little to the process on their own.

> You're missing a huge part of this: The "competition" you think you're referring to had, you know, actual rules

This is, of course, false.

Competition has no rules? Jury awards ZeniMax $500 million in Oculus VR lawsuit? I guess they made up some rules, no?

well, the us only pretends to like free market politics. in reality rich dickwads like regulation just fine, namely in the form of protecting the value of their property.

What it would do is punish companies that do real R&D, and reward companies that have no actual talent in that area. So ultimately the field would stagnate because no one would invest in R&D.

Is it "competition" when you're up against state-sponsored actors who will use tactics the rest of the world would consider illegal?

When exactly was this "day" when industrial espionage was legal?

It is legal. The us has no power over china's ip. the closest you're going to get to illegal is "violates a trade agreement", and what's the us gonna do, invade china? the cope levels here are extreme.

In the US, before 1996.

The economic power of the USA was arguably built on it.

I'm a bit confused what that would look like. Sending Americans to China to steal their secrets wouldn't work because the Chinese wouldn't hire them for exactly this reason.

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