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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I see the Times playing up the nationalistic components but the truth is that people go to companies, learn stuff, and start new companies doing the same thing only better all the time. It is perhaps even more rampant in California with its employee protection laws but it isn't unusual anywhere in the US.

The question I have is that if several students of a prominent professor at Harvard go to work at Intel and AMD as electrical engineers, and then later get together to form their own company, still in the US, to make a really energy efficient x86 equivalent processor, is that economic espionage or innovation? Generally we've held it to be the latter.

And then there is the number of students getting advanced degrees in the US from really bright professors, but are unable to get a Visa to actually work in the US?

It is hard for me to be outraged here.

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From the article - "Other emails cited in the indictment run through 2013, and the government contends they included a “stolen Avago design kit” for the chips."

You can obviously start a new company in the same field, just make sure you don't violate non-complete clause (if it exists). However, stealing code or product design is a strict NO whether you are in Silicon Valley or a University.

I was wondering about that. Generally you don't need to steal a design kit[1], the manufacturer gives them away at seminars and training in order to help you understand how their parts are used.

If I were going to start building a chip to compete with these guys I'd definitely want an evaluation board to test to see if my chip was a work alike to the competitor's chip.

[1] http://www.avagotech.com/pages/en/rf_microwave/demo_boards/

It does sound like witch hunting with a McCarthyist nationalistic vibe. Overall the brain drain from China to the US has been working to the benefit of the US, for years.

I expect we will more and more such propaganda pieces in the NYT and elsewhere, as China is being increasingly positioned as "the Adversary".

Yes. Chinese Americans earn on average 30% more than other U.S. adults. http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/asian-americans-lead...

While regrettable, the loss of some technology does not compensate for all of the advantages to the States of highly skilled immigrants from China. The top ranked comments on NYTimes are ignorant and do not describe the full picture.

Parents of Chinese Americans would have had to have been well-off almost by definition to afford sending their children to the U.S. It is true a lot of that wealth would have been spent or deflated due to living standard differences by the time they arrived, however the education they've previously attained as well as the mindset of trying to achieve a better future stays with them. The Chinese who bum around unemployed rorting government benefits and/or family generosity would not have come to the U.S. looking for a better future.

There is an inversion in politics, where the left are more anti-Asian than the right. Letting people express anti-Asian sentiment (even though equivalent sentiment against other groups would be verboten) is both a convenient escape valve for the populace (see the LA riots) and also makes the left seem less extreme.

See also the #cancelcolbert controversy[0]. Imagine if this had been any "oppressed" group instead.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-campaign-to-canc...

Agreed.

More conspiratorially, one comment on the article pointed out how easily this distracts from things like zero indictments of bankers for 2008, any administration officials for Iraq, NSA domestic spying and monitoring, holding Manning in solitary while Petraeus gets a slap on the wrist and a pension, and so on, and so on.

It's hard to take it as very conspiratorial, though, because all of the things listed are absolute atrocities.

+1. It's hard for the U.S. to take the moral high ground on espionage outrage until China's equivalent of the NSA has their fingers in as many pies. But it's conveniently easy for journalists to forget that.

In the case of porcelain technology, the process you describe went in reverse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_Xavier_d%27Entrecolles

Your comment lacks the context of China's economic policy. As bizarre as it sounds, Top Gear actually hit on it during one of their specials:

http://youtu.be/K0bNf-jcVU0

I know it's easy to discard what you're reading as nationalism, but the Chinese have a long history of theft of intellectual property and protecting it at the state level. It isn't about national pride at all, for me; our industry is one that is directly targeted. A new iPhone is copied in weeks, and that's not only a direct shot at American exports, it's a direct shot at my work. Why should I put the work into innovating when cheap copies will flood the market?

There's a slight difference between incremental improvement and the economic espionage described in the article, though I grant you the line is fine. You're potentially starting to see more desperate maneuvers (this isn't the first, and I agree with you that it's a potential stretch) because it's really hard to prosecute most of these and it's been an issue for a long time.

There is a difference between PRC specifically sending agents to the US to steal specific technologies, and a random group of Chinese nationals deciding to take US tech back home and profit off of it.

You're implying that you can discern the difference.

No, the reverse; the implication is that, since you can't tell the difference, you should be charitable and assume it's just some random people with a coincidental feature of X, rather than an X-ist conspiriacy. A lack of this kind of charity is what creates ideas like "the jews control the banks" or "the gay agenda."

Indeed, and furthermore, because of the sheer size of the population of China, it shouldn't surprise us to see stories about this that involve Chinese nationals. It's not surprising there are lots of great people but also less-great ones as well; it's a big country!

To actually suggest that there is some "organized Chinese conspiracy" thing happening, someone would need to show that this happens more often than statistically expected.

Just like the US did before it emerged as the #1 industrial producer in the world.

Up until 1865, the United States made extensive use of slave labor to grow its economy. It also made use of foreign innovations, stealing others' intellectual property.

Both were immoral, and neither should be accepted today.

To belabor the point generally speaking all western and Latin powers of the era employed slave labor and stole from each other.

Today lots of emerging countries still rely on what is in practice servitude labor. They don't outright own the people, but they practically do since they have little chance of escaping their situation. Migrants in se Asia. Rural folks working in Eastern china, etc., where employers withhold passports, international and national "passports".

This happens in the US, too, right now.

Just about everything exists everywhere, what matters is extent and degree and what authorities do once they find out.

It's commonplace. The H1-B visa is virtually designed for indentured servitude.

Most of the world agrees that slavery is ethically unjustifiable. Not everyone agrees to the same notions of intellectual property as the U.S. does, even among the developed world.

Also, even those who like IP laws in the U.S. would agree that comparing poor IP laws to allowing slavery is beyond absurd.

This story is, essentially: five people violated the law of their host country in a way that if they had been citizens would have led to a civil lawsuit. As a result, they are being charged and reported as state-sponsored spies.

Equating slavery with violating IP laws is a fallacy of extrapolation. One does not compare appropriately to the other. Especially considering IP laws have their roots in Monarchally bestowed monopolies and arguably do not do what they purport to do, which is encourage innovation.

We copied half of British government, too. I never implied otherwise (in fact I specifically said it isn't national for me). Our thinking on intellectual property has evolved since the time before the invention of electrical power and it is possible to learn from failures. Are you suggesting once someone makes a mistake everyone else is entitled to do so as long as said person was enormously successful in part due to said mistake? Everybody here has been party to the explosion of technology and knowledge in mere years and yet we defend poor judgment by saying "well, the United States did it 200 years ago, so clearly we don't know all we should know about the morality?"

The industrialization of the United States succeeded quickly for far more reasons than intellectual property.

The industrialization of the US happened similar to many other industrializing nations before and since and it has a lot to do with IP theft, not just a little. It is a recurring story throughout history: create, succeed and get bypassed. It's not a mistake. It's how the game of empires is played. It's part of how 3rd world countries become 1st world countries. China is no exception.

The US is always demanding 3rd world countries to stay 3rd world because it suits us. If necessary the US will bomb you if you don't play by "the rules". How moral is that?

Does the context apply? Lets say you saw a really cool operating system from Bell Labs called UNIX but they were all pissy about trademarks and licensing fees so you made your own that, to the user is similar enough that you don't have to learn a bunch of new syntax or command options, but to avoid AT&T's lawyers from being confused that maybe you ripped off their code you call yours Linux.

Cheerios from P&G, Honey-Os from Trader Joes? Dr Pepper from the Dr Pepper/Snapple folks or Dr Skipper from the kind folks at Safeway?

And really who is the "good guy" and who is the "bad guy" here? In all of the product "rip offs" in the US and in China they are significantly cheaper than the 'branded' version. So consumers have a choice, the widget made to the 'brand's level of quality or one made as cheap as possible. And a lot of consumers go for the cheap ones. That is why I see a bunch of Comkia Ipad chargers rather than Apple ones.

The fact that a lot of this originates in China has, in my opinion, more to do with the fact that things are manufactured there, rather than the fact that they are Chinese. Even before the great American manufacturing diaspora there were US manufacturers making "cheap knock offs" of various kinds of things. Here in the land of Right and Legitimacy. Basically, there are a lot of American consumers that go for 'cheap'. And there appears to be a lot of Chinese consumers who want the "look" of an expensive brand but they don't want to pay a premium for it. So they get it from the shop owned by an uncle or something.

Now I am the first guy to cry "Foul!" when someone steals the plans to a system that took a long time to develop and then sets up manufacturing without having to pay any development costs. But if factory B goes out and buys a widget that Factory A made, takes it apart and figures they can make it cheaper and they will be sure that people know it isn't a Factory A widget its a Factory B widget? That is just regular competition.

There's a difference between cheap generic knock-off and a clone designed to rip-off the buyer by lying about specifications. Generic brands acknowledge what they are and the customer generally knows and can at least expect it to do or be what it says on the tin. What I find most distasteful is that manufacturers there, seemingly especially in electronics and chemical products, don't even bother with that or any semblance or that - "If I get one over on you and don't get caught, good on me / I got caught, you mad bro? what are you going to do, lol." attitude. It's the difference between doing the best you can to provide something like a more expensive product and actively seeking to defraud your customer and not caring. the fact that it's seemingly so pervasive doesn't help matters or reputations of legitimate players.

I think your point is interesting but the article refers to company secrets mostly.

Your government feeds your kids when your career get "disrupted" by another American company, maybe they took your jerbs but they pay taxes that goes into a pot that helps other Americans. The company goes overseas, and that's jobs and money happening in a system (say, China's) that doesn't owe you a thing if you're made destitute because of it.

Thanks for very eloquently expressing my reaction to the article!

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