I'm sorry, but China has been a pro at stealing IP from the West. I'm actually with Trump on this one (gasp) - but I think it needs to go one step further and actually drop trade all together.
Fact is, China straight up has people from the government who sit in factories reverse engineering the stuff that's built. The Chinese government (after it's been reverse engineered) helps support competitive businesses, then locks out the U.S. or other Western competitors (as it's in the national interest).
It's insane that the west has put up with this, because it's literally going to cripple the west in the long run.
Regarding this case, it's espionage essentially... But not really supprising given the prior events.
Exactly. None need look further than the story of american superconductor. American superconductor made wind turbine control systems. They partnered with a Chinese company called sinovel who made the turbines. Eventually some Chinese engineer stole the company's software and gave it to the company. The Chinese company canceled the contract with american superconductor and then used the stolen IP to continue business as usual. American superconductor was nearly bankrupted in the process.
Free trade only works if you have fair trade, otherwise it is every man for themselves. Trump knows that trade with China is rigged so there is no point in having free trade with them. Most people who complain about Trump playing hardball with China are very uninformed about the reality of the situation. China is getting ready to gut the US economy from the inside out. China will make sure it never has a trade deficit with the USA. They will buy some of our stuff but only if they have a trade surplus.
It’s extremely unfortunate that we’re having to take the painful tariff route, and while Trump is not stately in his handling of the situation, it’ll be a valuable lesson to China if the US can push their overleverged economy into recession with escalating tariffs (as it’s clear they’ll continue their advancement through the theft of Western technology).
Yesterday China fell back to having the #3 largest stock exchange. With US success other countries might start piling on soon, hopefully China will take action before that happens though, it could get really ugly really quick for them
Knowledge wants to be free. Adam Smith considered IP laws to be an unnecessary evil. The Chinese are just being good capitalists. American Superconductor nearly went bankrupt because they couldn't compete on a level playing field.
Do you believe that, without IP law, we'd still have companies invest the amounts they do into creating new technology (particularly in high R&D areas like pharma)?
Pfffff, just not pharma. A lion share of genuine new pharmaceutical research is done by underpaid undergrad mules in sweatshops called "captive R&D centres" in places like China and India, that the reality.
No. The US Government is 18%-20% of all R&D spending in the US. A lot of that is in the military budget of course.
Which makes perfect sense when you consider the size of the private economy versus the share of government spending that could reasonably go to R&D (versus entitlements, military, infrastructure, etc).
Private corporations are around ~$400 billion of the ~$550 billion per year spent in the US on R&D.
The government R&D figure as a share is higher in the EU than in the US, but not dramatically so. The private sector is simply too large by comparison and can focus its resources more narrowly on things like R&D than what a government could be expected to.
Not only does private industry spend more on R&D, but I'd personally argue that their $400 billion is required to be more effective at a per-dollar level, given the inherent competitiveness and need to create something profitable.
hah, I'm all for piracy, but only for personal use - if someone steals ("copies") from me and then makes a profit, I want (and deserve) a (large) chunk of that profit.
Research isn't going to pay for itself just magically.
You're highly misinformed. Trump never cared about the IP angle, only deficits. The IP angle came out of a report that was long in the works. Furthermore it doesn't make sense to talk about bilateral trade figures. China has basically balanced trade with the world because it sources inputs from abroad. That's also without talking about the services trade of which China buys a great deal from us.
Funny thing to mention, I think 95% of industrial espionage effort yields zero if not negative benefit. The problem is that you are always stealing a "cat in a bag"
For machinery, rarely there is anything like a "secret sauce:" Soon after the fall of USSR, Chinese defence companies flocked to Russia buying every defence tech possible. Russian companies had a funny way to troll Chicoms: they will not sell them a simple, mid-tier equipment, but only the top notch, and most complicated one, with which even they themselves had problem dealing.
For example, Soyuz transferred tech for their super expensive, small volume manufactured R179 engine. Yes, that was Soviet response to F135 class engines. The showstopper was its very high temperature turbine made with monocrystaline blades grown in situ within (!) a ceramic fibre reinforcing mesh.
Even with all blueprints, documentation of manufacturing processes, and working samples on their hands, Chinese never made a single working engine. That state program to copy R179 continues to this day as I know.
And I think they spent way more money on it in 25 years, than if they were to create a thing from scratch. That is something obvious to every experienced engineer, but not to bureaucrats from Chinese three letter agencies who are convinced that they are just an inch away from some "secret trick" that will magically make everything work.
Why? I think it's quite clear, to know what valuable knowhow to steal, you have to know quite a bit about the subject as well. After doing that much research, it may well be that you know enough to do it on your own.
This is what I personally think, and given that I worked in a more serious part of tech industry than running diary websites for a big part of my career, I think my though has truth credit to it.
Though, my career in serious engineering companies is not that long, I don't see a thing in any serious piece of engineering that ever qualifies as non-obvious. And under serious pieces of engineering I mean things from SCADA for Baosteel's main plant, to widgets for Airbus and EADS.
Nor I ever qualify this engineering work as very laborious. Doing "Big engineering" is more about bureaucratic and legal work than doing actual engineering from my own personal impressions.
Moreover, whenever "big engineering" is involved, and you hear names like WW groups, EADS, Siemens, Rheinmetal, you don't "innovate." The cost of screwup is so high, that there are even special people employed to watch that nobody dares to replace existing working parts with their "innovation." In general, when doing such work, you want to use most proven and conservative designs over any improvements.
I'm probably going to assume too much, but I guess @baybal2 comes from a Russian background, and 95% is a meme/figure of speech there, meaning "the overwhelming majority", and doesn't refer to a specific number. It's (possibly) just a case of English as a second language or misunderstanding.
It obviously depends upon the context. But for many industrial processes and designs, the design and documentation alone is only the bare minimum needed to replicate it. The rest is in people's heads and hands, and needs to be passed on by training over weeks or months.
Here's a trivial example: in a physical chemistry lab I was working in, I was training a new worker how to do a particular analysis. The ISO 9001 documentation said to pipette 1000µl of the sample and 1000µl of a standard into a 2ml GC sample container, using an electronic pipetter. I got repeated accuracy to within 5 decimal places; the trainee got about 1 d.p accuracy, using the same equipment and samples. Because skill and technique matter, take time to learn and master, and those aren't in the instructions.
This applies to any process. Having the instructions aren't enough. No matter how many designs you rip off, you still need the right people with the right equipment and the right skills and techniques to fabricate it correctly, or duplicate the process exactly, etc. Industrial espionage can only take you so far. The effort required to rip off the designs and documentation might be more than the effort required to do your own design and establish your own processes. Particularly when you're otherwise inheriting other peoples design choices and you need to completely reverse engineer their thinking. In a way, it's similar to how writing software from scratch can be quicker than making a change to a huge legacy codebase. You're free of the design constraints, and you don't need waste weeks ploughing through someone else's mess to find our what those constraints are.
Another problem is the starting materials. Have a read up on the effort required to manufacture FOGBANK, a material used in nuclear warheads. The materials and process were completely documented, but the people who made it were long retired. It took over half a decade of effort to rediscover and replicate the process, not only to learn the techniques but also to discover that the process relied on an impurity in one of the materials which wasn't documented.
Not just in the heads and hands, but in the available infrastructure and supply chain as well. A classic example: SR-71 airframe documentation would probably have been nearly useless for Soviets, since they didn't have good titanium machining capability at the time (they decided to go with steel for MiG-25 airframe, for example).
>monocrystaline blades grown in situ within (!) a ceramic fibre reinforcing mesh.
Holy hell. How in the world do they pull that off while still keeping the crystal growth boundary continuous?? That sounds amazing, do you have any more information on the subject?
>That sounds amazing, do you have any more information on the subject?
No, I don't,
But it is not hard to imagine. This has something to do with preventing the surface of ceramics interfering with monocrystal growth.
1. They keep the mesh temperature higher than that of melt. Knowing that both Boron and SiC fibres are grown on top of Tungsten wire, it is not that hard to imagine that you can heat them by electricity. Coreless varieties of ceramic and boron fibres are very uncommon. Very likely they used tungsten cored fibres.
2. As with anything involved with growing crystal on a crystal, one has to make sure that crystalline lattices of materials are compatible. A challenge is to marry the somewhat amorphous, and rough surface of ceramic fibres with some coating with more ordered lattice that will not disturb the monocrystal growth. Growing of crystals on top of amorphous materials is know to be doable, growing of crystals on top of another with dissimilar lattice is also known to be possible. I believe no "sci-fi" is involved there.
I believe that you can even the surface of the fibre and the coating on it with repeated acid dips and recurring grow-overs of the fibre or coating material. Once you have a fine surface on the fibre, you can use something like ALD process to produce a "dissimilar lattice interface" in a very controlled, defect free fashion.
3. You have to make sure that fibres and melt do not chemically react, or react adversely to the process. The challenge there is that at temperatures of the monocrystaline alloy melt, pretty much any material will react to some extend with it. But I think the chemistry challenge is the easiest here.
I tend to be sympathetic to your views, but I recently heard a different take on this whole IP / Copyright theft matter and I'm not sure what to make of it:
1. US residents and workers own pretty much zero IP/Copyrights themselves and basically zero stock in companies that own IP/Copyrights.
2. Therefore, forcing Chinese companies and consumers to "pay up" for IP and Copyrights really only benefits US companies and wealthy stockholders (not US consumers and workers).
3. If there no charge at all for this stolen IP, Chinese companies would be able to offer cheaper exported products to US workers and consumers, who would actually benefit more from the lower prices than from protecting the IP in the first place.
4. Furthermore, if US company products (e.g. Microsoft Windows) are pirated in China, it leaves the Chinese consumer with more dollars to buy other US imported goods which are not IP-focused (e.g. soybeans or almonds or wine or something) thus benefiting the average US consumer and worker more.
Here’s a personal example from about 10 years ago. Imagine that you spend several years inventing something new. You put in the sweat equity and take on opportunity costs. Then, your product seems to be ready. You’re very excited, so you decide to release it to the public at a popular trade show.
On the first day, you meet lots of interested people. Some are American, some European. Oh, and several large gatherings of Chinese people also approach your booth. They admire your invention, too. But, look, and they brought along cameras, video recorders, a few people taking notes. Your heart sinks a bit. Are they really blatantly stealing your idea with no shame? You don’t know. Then, a few months later an (inferior) but visually identical product enters the market. Then a couple more appear. They’re all priced at a fraction of the price of yours...
That was the reality a decade or two ago. Maybe it has gotten better. But, things like that have a tendency to make long impressions on the memory.
My question is: does this happen in China? Do Chinese companies steal from other Chinese companies? Is it normal for Chinese people to steal from their friends, family, neighbors? Or, is this behavior only directed at the West?
If you look into the story of American Superconductor, Sanyo Shinkansen, Apple's self driving car project and now, GE..it's all similar.
It's their culture, they don't believe in attribution nor fair trade, they're used to growing up in a red ocean. That's the way they are.
I work with Chinese companies on a regular basis, I never give them access to my repos, always uglify my JS code, and ensure strict rate limits for anything other than my office's IP address and carefully monitor access logs from their IPs and always implement kill switches in my software. I know what I'm doing isn't going to stop them if they wanted to, but for most part, it keeps them at bay.
Just watch out if you work in an industry where your IP is everything.
I just think “culture” is a strong word to be used in that situation. I guess I believe it’s human to act like that and it depends on your competitive situation how you view the rightfulness of it
Exactly. Reverse engineering to better understand how to design and manufacture a competing product with very different mechanics is ok. But there are cars in china that are one for one copies of major brands. They’re everywhere.
There are many software product licenses forbidding reverse engineering, and I'm seeing more user-hostile reverse engineering efforts in products in general, both in design, implementation, and legal realms. Unless reverse engineering is encoded into protected status in law, it will be extinguished through commercial avenues.
There's a large step between buying a product and reverse engineering it and getting hired at a company in order to exfiltrate its internal files. One of those is called industrial espionage.
I guess its already implied, but that title should really be "theft from American companies," ie highspeed rail IP theft from German and Japanese companies would otherwise make this list.
I'm curious (and fearful) as a naturalized US citizen of former Chinese nationality--is your sort of paranoia and general attribution of this to culture common? The man arrested was a US citizen (and would have had to give up Chinese citizenship to become one) but would have obviously looked Chinese.
If you had to work with me, would you actively try to obfuscate your work because you believe at a cultural level that I'm keen to steal?
You said nasty things about Chinese companies because a US citizen stole IP from GE. And then you wonder why a Chinese-born US would be wary of working with you.
I said those because, a US citizen stole IP from GE, but sent it back to Chinese companies.
Hence, I clearly mentioned why I don't trust Chinese companies, whereas the misinterpretation here is automatically the assumption that I have a problem with Chinese as a race, which isn't true.
Is there really a connection though? Some of the most critical people about China proper are it’s first and second generation emigrants. Just look at people like Gordon Chang.
No we'd probably work great together and be good friends. Now if I happened to be CEO in a sensitive industry.. it'd cross my mind ya.
Nothing personal, but slightly higher than average probability that you maintain enough ties to home to be persuaded in one form or another by the superpower pouring immense resources into doing exactly that.
I think it’s healthy to be a little paranoid when your paranoia level matches what you’re seeing.
Imagine being a Chinese citizen who reads the news a lot and every couple months, they read a story about how an American or a “Western” person living in China stole some IP from a Chinese company.
How do you think they’re going to feel about Americans and Westerners?
With this in mind, I wouldn’t blame a person if they were more distrustful of a Chinese coworker than say, a British coworker.
This is how propaganda works, too, unfortunately. Propaganda isn't usually false, but just gives an unbalanced impression, e.g. where is the news report of every other trade-secret violation?
> It's their culture, they don't believe in attribution nor fair trade, they're used to growing up in a red ocean. That's the way they are.
While I too find their blatant copying annoying and reprobate, you have to consider how they must view the West and its interference–to put it mildly–in their relatively-recent past.
Literally bombarding nations that don't want to trade with you?
China's government of that same period was hardly innocent, committing numerous genocidal wars of territorial expansion [0][1]. Hardly useful to compare either side of that historical situation to the present. Multi-generational assignment of guilt is something best left to the North Korean criminal justice system, I think.
It does apply to Germany...after the first world war. The Germans didn'f feel shafted after the second world war because someone was paying attention during the interwar period and figured helping with the rebuilding and not inflaming tensions was a better idea.
What is there to steal? The primary resource from China technology-wise is physical materials - mostly their near-monopoly of rare earth metals. I believe most technological advancement happens in the west (for now) still.
Why is the act usually perpetuated against the US. China trades with other countries but rarely you hear news of China stealing their tech. Why does China strive to a great deal to steal tech from the US
There is a lot of bitterness toward the US in China possibly stemming from their perception that they should be leading the world in every respect, and the irksome reality that for much of the past century or more the US has been at the forefront. Yes that is changing or has already changed now, but they are still very unhappy about having been behind for so long, given their rightful place as the superior (in their mind) civilization.
Yeah our (US) civilization has plenty of flaws, I'm not meaning to suggest otherwise. Just saying since you asked, if it seems they are targeting the US a lot, this could be part of it. Plus the obvious fact that the US is the biggest and softest target.
In China, the manager class, the bureaucrat class have an opinion of their own people as worthless.
They don't believe that a Chinese engineer can make a widget better than an American engineer, because they think there is something inherently wrong with everything Chinese.
In their disturbed minds, they think if everything Chinese is bad, this also makes them bad too. Thus, they make themselves appear as un-Chinese as possible:
See, the only place in the world where American car brands making "falling apart as you drive" cars made a dent in the market is China!
In reality though, this conduct of theirs, acquiring material attributes of "Americanness" themselves, is just a psychological compensation.
I'm not trying to insult anybody here. This is my observation from working in trade with China for 10 years, and living there for 3 years.
What needs to be fixed, is the toxic "Laoban" culture, an "old boys club" of inept, privileged, people currently running China.
> ...the toxic "Laoban" culture, an "old boys club" of inept, privileged, people currently running China.
Is this largely a generation-specific culture, that will mostly pass on as the generation dies off, or embedded within the Chinese culture itself, and has a far greater inertial momentum to overcome and thus will take much longer to turn around (perhaps even generations of change)? My gut feel from my general reading is this is an intrinsic part of Chinese culture, though slowly changing starting at the more youth-oriented demographic-populated fringes that interact the most with the outside world.
Given the way their government work (one-party rule), I would blame it more on their political system than their culture. Obviously you can make the argument that culture precedes political system, and also the same argument the other way. Bit of a nature vs nurture thing.
That hasn't been reality in a LONG time. And even at their worst, American cars were still light years ahead of what China has managed to produce thus far.
2) If you are reading US news then you only have access to the biggest international stories since everything else is deemed irrelevant, e.g. [1] "Train Makers Rail Against China's High-Speed Designs"
3) Chinese companies simply buy companies in other countries to gain access to knowledge (Volvo)
I've written this here before but a chinese engineer stole 30,000 design docs from Denso, which supplies a lot of technology under the hood of Toyota vehicles. It made national headlines and was considered a moment of disgrace for the company.
We don't hear about it because it's a national matter and only the national news outlets cover it.
I'm curious: did the company that benefitted from the Denso theft 'give them back'? Or did they quietly continue using the tech? Sometimes I think the whole 'disgrace' game is just a scapegoat to allow moneyed interests to keep doing exactly as they please. But I'm cynical.
Because of the 'disgrace' angle, of course. It was recognized as a disgraceful act by an engineer. I am wondering if that disgrace extends to the money folk who took it from that person, or the disgrace ends at the scapegoat. That's all.
It was the company who was infiltrated who was disgraced, not the company (more like companies, Chinese tech espionage is state backed and whatever is collected is widely distributed) that benefited.
You are confusing two different things: Reality and perception of reality.
All countries in the world strive to "steal" tech from those that have it. USA itself "stole" the designs of industrial mills and presses and machine tools from Britain while it was forbidden with capital punishment.
Th USA also "stole" nuclear tech from Germany, that was the first to fission the atom or the first to create semiconductor diodes. They just gave the guys working on that on Europe much better quality of life. The jet engines of Germany (operation Paperclip), their rockets, the chemical industry traveled to the US after the war.
Today the US spy on communications worldwide and the biggest application for it is industrial espionage. With things like Intel ME on every computer or your real name registered on it, it becomes extremely simple to steal the designs created on those computers when you have control of this hardware(intel is an American company and they are required to "cooperate" with secret services).
China stealing German/European technology is a common topic here in Germany. HN is just a relatively US focused site, so it isn't discussed as often here.
I'm Chinese, and I can tell you there are many people in the dark corners of China's Internet are talking about similar kind of things: Spy stories, military secrets, dark politics & histories, rumors etc. Basic human nature. But if you don't read Chinese and look into the right place, you'll simply unaware of their existence.
I don't think all English speakers can also speak or read German, so maybe that's the reason, rather than "They just don't care".
There is occasional US technology theft as well, but you hear about it a lot less. It's kind of embedded in the Boeing/Airbus conflict, as well as lots of minor issues like taking out US patents for non-Western traditional medicine.
This stinks of naive Nationalism or simple confirmation bias.
I'd suggest that China is beginning to match US creativity with software -- a quick glance at the rising popularity of several github repositories that have Mandarin README's would confirm this. https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-ar...
The naming part is probably about brand recognition and they are doing really well with Huawei(which recently surpassed Apple on the number of unites sold metric).
Also, Vue.js seems to have a lot of Chinese contribution.
Their Google, FB and Twitter knock-offs seem to be doing good too.
Let's take Vue as 1. Anything else? Programming languages, algorithms?
Their Google, FB, and Twitter knockoffs don't count, they are all crap compared to Western versions. The only reason the Chinese versions are alive is because the competition is blocked.
I'm not suggesting Chinese people aren't good, there's plenty of them working on top tier stuff outside of China. What I am suggesting is that China's policy of crippling the internet has consequences. As long as their internet is crippled China will lag the rest of the world in software.
> Their Google, FB, and Twitter knockoffs don't count, they are all crap compared to Western versions.
Tencent has $35b in revenue and Baidu has $12b revenue (USD). Meanwhile Twitter has $0.7b in revenue (for reference, FB is $40b).
Yes Twitter appeals more to me but just because I'm not the target market of those Chinese platforms doesn't mean they are crap. They make real money and work for their users.
I'm not saying Tencent, Baidu, and Weibo are unsuccessful. I'm saying that they are successful because Facebook(+WhatsApp), Google, and Twitter are blocked by all 3 of China's ISPs. If that were not the case I strongly believe those Chinese companies would be niche players if they even survived at all.
To address the sibling comment by kuwze, the reason why Tencent is successful in payments is because the Chinese government blocked everyone competing with it, and also because the Chinese market lacked credit cards. Same thing for Alibaba. It's similar to how African countries went straight to mobile before more developed places did, and nobody holds those carriers up as examples of innovation. If we didn't already have complete acceptance of credit cards we would probably be using wallets from Microsoft or Amazon or some other tech giant.
I have to respect Alibaba on the e-commerce though. In my opinion they're better than Amazon. Their software is dismal compared to Amazon, but when you measure them by the range of products you can get delivered, how fast and inexpensively, it's clearly superior, and they enjoy no protection from competition by Amazon. Alibaba is really great, the best perk of living in China hands down. Didi is cool too, though like all the copy cats it's just crap as a software company compared to Uber or Lyft.
So anyway, no disrespect to the business savvy of China's big tech. And I also see that there's some awesome units in them. For example, Tencent has some absolutely fantastic security groups. All I'm saying is that China's tech giants didn't get here by technical innovation, whereas America's did. And not only that, China's internet policy has the side effect of crushing innovation so we're not likely to see anything interesting spring from there.
OMG, you are so disconnected... Chinese big tech (BAT) is much younger with tons of senior engineers coming back from FAANG. Their tech stack is very cutting edge and arguably better, e.g:
I'm vouching this comment. Obviously you created this throwaway for this.
I know what singles day is about. I'm unconvinced by your arguments, but will concede that it's not a good idea to for the US to drive good talent away with shitty immigration policy.
Have you used Alibaba's cloud service? Why is it as clunky as a second rate shared hosting service from 15 years ago? Can you explain that to me?
Also, given the fact that I have to go through insane bureaucracy just to get an account on it, what do the tech kids of China have the option to do except publish miniprograms on WeChat? Is China really going to be a leader based on returning engineers from the US?
Apollo's code looks pretty interesting. Will keep an eye on that. Funny though, I'm having trouble browsing the site. Requests fail half the time. Oh look, it's hosted by Baidu.. no wonder.
This breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to call names in arguments. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here. Your comment would be fine without that first sentence.
These are the best answers I've heard so far. What are your favorite projects or products that depend on these? Any more examples you feel worthy of mention?
None of those qualify as significant. I'm asking for examples like: Linux, Java, OpenSSL, PHP, Apache, MySQL.. widely used codecs or implementations of them, compilers or scripting languages, network stacks.. frameworks.. like Ruby on Rails, Laravel, React.. graphics libraries or tools like Photoshop, GIMP, autocad, unity, unreal engine..
Can you think of an example that is widely popular and not trivial? Is there some software related thing that originated from China that is just so fundamentally important that the rest of the world could not resist copying it or building on it?
I'm willing to bet you have never heard of Aamir Khan -- but considering how much of the world is a fan of him (largely in China and India) he is considered by Forbes & Newsweek to be the biggest movie star in the world (attribution: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2017/10/05/heres-why-aa... )
I think the same can go with software. Just because it's not popular in the West (and it's not discussed widely on Hacker News or trade mags/sites) doesn't mean it's not very popular worldwide.
My only point (originally) was that Nationalism and confirmation bias can cloud objective judgement about something. Is your point that that Chinese software is at best 'trivial'? (If not, please clarify)
The article also mentions the previous Nanya case that made national headlines in Taiwan. These incidents don't make it on Hacker News or US media, though.
Semiconductor are the other strategic area China wants to catch up in, which Taiwan can do pretty well. Still very protected industry (the knowledge is super diffuse and closely guarded, only outdated fab equipment is exported to mainland fabs).
If you hire me at your company, then I take all the information, code, files, work on your big new project that you've invested all of your company's money into, and go to your competitor with it (for a handsome fee) - you're not going to proclaim 'copying' your IP et al is not stealing. Not unless you're suicidal and don't care about your employees and their jobs.
No business could survive and make long-term plans and large capital investment if that's how the world actually worked.
How about walking out of an accounting firm with private business files and handing them to competitors for a fee? Still not information stealing?
Everything illegal is not “theft”. Kidnapping, for example, involves many of the same aspects of theft, but still isn’t theft. Likewise, illegal copying and corporate espionage, while they may be crimes, are not “theft”.
I do think we could benefit from having a unique terms to differentiate the taking of something that doesn't belong to you which deprives another person of their copy and the making a copy of something that doesn't belong to you which does not deprive you of a copy.
If I take your car, you biggest concern is that you don't have a car now. If I somehow copied your car, you probably wouldn't care too much.
If I take your banking info, your concern is that I have a copy. That you didn't lose your copy is a lesser concern than that I have a copy and the damage I can do with that copy.
While these two things seem related, they do seem different enough that having a different word to differentiate them.
I was making a slightly different distinction; between taking a copy of something which is available to buy/rent publicly, and taking a copy of something which is a “trade secret” as in the secret sauce or secret recipe which makes your product special.
Taking a copy of something which is available to buy without paying is perhaps depriving the company of one sale, or not if you weren’t going to buy it but would happen to look at it for free. In some cases this free copy can even have positive net expected value, e.g. in the case where you read a book or watch a movie without paying for it and then tell people how great it is.
However in the case of stealing trade secrets it directly undercuts the entire value proposotion of the company, particularly since trade secrets are not patented so anyone is free to replicate the result and sell it in the marketplace, presuming that they independently invented the same process.
So taking a copy of a trade secret is considered espionage or corporate warfare and is a direct attack on a company in a way that personally ripping a copy of DVD doesn’t come close.
Wouldn't this depend upon how it is used? If I take someone's copy of a game and make it available for all to download, it can deprive the company of many sales. If I take Coca Cola's trade secret formula and research it for my own curiosity, but then do nothing with it, they would lose nothing.
Would the ability of the company to challenge the sharing of the game really make a major distinction, especially since it would be possible to host the website in a country that doesn't care enough to take it down?
Of course, in the case in the linked article, I think it is reasonable to assume this wasn't done just for sating some curiosity.
There are actually existing terms, coming from English common law, for exactly these sorts of situations. They are not in common usage outside the legal profession, but perhaps they should be.
"Conversion" is a tort (so, not a criminal offense) in which one party deprives another party of control over the second party's lawful property. It can involve physically taking the property, but could also involve otherwise depriving the rightful owner of control over it.
Taking someone's proprietary data and passing it to a competitor strikes me as a fair example of conversion, since it deprives the rightful owner of control -- they cannot, once the information has been taken and passed on, exercise control over it by keeping it exclusively to themselves. The value of the information has been destroyed.
It also covers situations in which the property has not actually been removed, but access to it by its rightful owner has been denied. E.g., encrypting files on your employer's computer such that your employer can't access them, but not actually removing them. (This is sort of equivalent to going to a warehouse and putting a lock, that only you have the key to, on a container holding someone else's stuff.)
The intriguing thing about Conversion, which I've always thought was interesting, is that it's independent of intent. Unlike the criminal acts of theft, where there's an issue of mens rea, conversion can occur without any intent -- the deprivation can happen as a consequence of some other action, but you can still be liable for some remedies, under some conditions.
There's centuries of caselaw about conversion and the traditional remedies for it ("trover" and "replevin"), much of it designed expressly to discourage vigilantism in the premodern and early industrial world. I think we could learn something from this, particularly as cyber crime becomes more common.
So this has me wondering, if I were to copy someone's car, would that count as conversion, and would the victim be the owner of the car, or the company who owns the right to make the car, or the dealer, or some other party?
China steals IP (especially military and space) from Russia all the time. It just doesn’t get into the western news much. Even if they aren’t enemies anymore, they are still frenemies.
IP theft is also a problem in Europe, Australia, etc, but again, the news doesn’t reach us often.
Maybe just maybe the survival of the individual company is not that important to a politician who cares more about stability of a system of states. Kind of like the citizens property thrown under the bus for a interstate.
But is there any evidence? The usefulness of Nortel's network tech is generally limited by the hardware platforms it was designed for, you really aren't going to run their PowerPC binaries for their PBXes and cellular gear on any other platform, and IBM isn't going to sell you the CPUs for making knockoffs in quantity.
Reimplementing what Nortel had is non-trivial, but look at where Freeswitch and Asterisk are today. The closed competitors are limping along, with most repackaging the two main open source solutions.
Where I got downvoted to oblivion and then flagged.
This worries me as much as this article, because it make people associate China and Chinese companies with unfriendly behaviours.
If you say "not all", you are called a government shill. The same goes with articles trying to point out discrimination in US university admissions.
This is not posted to create dissent, but to reduce exclusion or invalidation that other reader may feel.
Maybe I should say differently: if you replace "asian" by "jewish" or "black" and the phrase sounds horribly racist, maybe that is because it is racist in the first place. Please do not do that.
I am a Chinese and I am not comfortable with most of comments here. But I see lots of places that China companies can do much better though. I see people are growing awareness of IP or copyright, I hope these companies can do just better.
There is a whole society ingrained in “copying”. Mainland Chinese don’t see IP theft as theft. They see it as simply “copying”. It’s ok to copy. But not to steal right? So just preach that it’s ok by changing the view. Then allow copying to happen endlessly without retribution because without it. The economy is done.
Well, it is not theft. Theft means that what you are stealing is not there anymore afterwards. Like actually stealing (unique) plans. Not saying that copying is actually okay, but using more sensational terminology is not really helping.
Same thing is going on with "piracy", in Germany they actually coined the term "Raubkopie" (robbed copy) which implies that a copy is taken by violent force.
What about theft of revenue, profits, money spent on new R&D because there is a company or government willing to copy your idea and subsidize its development heavily as to maximise their economic growth.
It’s theft. Handbags to manufacturing techniques. Source code to schematics. Science to business models. It’s all meant to prop up local business. Pin duo duo just had their IPO. Now there’s so many fakes and copies that no one knows what’s real on their anymore.
Didi vs Uber is a great example. Didi copied the idea, took government subsidies. But then the government stole the competition completely by shutting down Uber and forcing a merger with Didi.
You can't just redefine "theft" as "deprive of potential earnings/subsidies", watering down definitions is helping no one. I agree that the depriving is what is happening here by copying but this is what shouls be called out then, not a made-up theft.
> What about theft of revenue, profits, money spent on new R&D
If you redefine it like that, then competition itself is theft. After all, if I start competing with you, I deprive you of revenue/profits by forcing you to decrease your margins...
You are depriving the victim of earnings associated with the IP, market position, sales opportunites, all the while sticking them with r&d expenses, which happens even if you are making a copy for personal use.
If you analyze your own writing you will realize there are implicit beliefs in your thinking that are not trivial to have:
-You believe ideas are properties. IP means Intellectual property.
-Ideas could be stolen, like any property, that is you take ownership of something letting the original owner without the ability to use it.
Europe and then US were developed copying and improving on the ideas of others. E.g Romans looked at people with mining knowledge and conquered them to acquire the knowledge(and the mines). They did the same with Greece. Toledo's steel real origin was a secret so Romans would not conquer them.
Europe benefited from ideas like powder manufacturing and improved over that creating dynamite. They improved over compasses making them suitable for sea navigation. Original compasses from China were terrible.
Britain copied the ideas and knowledge that lead to industrialization from the Netherlands, who had taken it from the rest of Europe, being at the end of a big river.
Then the US copied from England. Native Americans were exterminated as they could not copy the new ideas fast enough in order to defend themselves.
The thing that changed in Taiwan is they started building industries where they needed to produce their own intellectual property. As that became more important, they started seeing the value of respecting IP.
With software piracy, the government got so serious about it, they instituted fines for businesses set at 400x the price of any software being pirated. So a pirated copy of Windows used by a bank, say, could get very expensive very fast... perhaps still cheaper than buying Windows for every computer but presumably that purchase would be part of the corrective action mandated, with the fine being on top of that.
But... Taiwan has a democratically elected government, not whatever system China has (I truly don't know, because it's so opaque... it's certainly not communist). Results may be different.
Taiwan was a dictatorship for much of the time it was economically developing, as was South Korea. We can’t really contribute their success to democracy, just perhaps their continued stability.
Random poster on HN is not sure... what a surprise, hah! I was there working at a systems integration company that was feeling the impact of the legal changes around IP. They were huge news. At the same time the election process had just opened up because the previously iron-fisted ruling KMT party finally caved to pressure to transition things out of an era where they insisted the government had to be on a war footing, to a new era that included allowing other parties to truly run (and win!) not just in theory, but in practice. Exciting times.
> But I see lots of places that China companies can do much better though.
You could say this about any place, in any time in history. And anyone who can offer something more substantive either doesn't dare to speak freely if they are in China or have friends or relatives there, or weren't even born because their free-thinking grandparents were murdered, am I wrong?
Seriously, you can stop right after "I am a Chinese and I am not comfortable" -- how could you possibly be. You're generations into deformation by totalitarian leaders, and that's the first thing they take. Where human lives are worth nothing, a "growing awareness of IP", which isn't even a growing respect, just an awareness, is not going to do shit in the big scheme, and doing "just better" is saying nothing other than putting a focus on not wanting to be explicit. Maybe you meant to say "much", but then bit your tongue, I don't know. But "just better", to me when I read it, has in ellipsis the question "better how?" before it.
Anyway, you can't expect a country to treat citizens of other countries better than its own. I'm German and tired of ignorance and whiny kiddos playing with fire that can consume us all, kthx. Been there, done that, heard all of it, reject it completely.
I see people are growing awareness of IP or copyright, I hope these companies can do just better.
I hope they never do, and continue to ignore the western concepts of IP or copyright. The culture is just different, and that doesn't make it any better or worse.
Many countries have gone through a period when they used unconventional means to catch up, because they had nothing to lose. If US and allies punished China with tariffs in 1970s, it would have no effect because China just came out of being embargoed and having no export to speak of.
Now China is getting into the territory of having something to lose, between pressure from trade partners and internal forces, it'll eventually fall in line with other developed countries.
That being said, sino-phobia in US may or may not get better, depends on how US economy is doing, and if a new arch-enemy emerges to direct public anger at.
Given there are ~7.5 billion people on Earth, and given we're getting more interconnected every single day, and given there is more "stuff" being invented every single day, at what point will we just assume this kind of stuff is commonplace and it won't make the news anymore?
In the same way a lot of forward-looking people are seeing a future were full-time work will have to be replaced by some form of Universal Basic Income, I wonder when we'll realize the whole IP / Copyright / "It's mine, you can't have it" mentality will have to be replaced.
That is an awesome thought, but for the moment, China's playing an incredibly unfair game - they're stealing Western technology, while at the same time preventing Western companies from accessing the Chinese market.
I mean, looks like it worked out great for them. I'm just not sure why Western governments don't retaliate, e.g. by taxing Chinese exports and investments (i.e. similar to what Trump is trying to do now, but more targeted - e.g. specifically target companies that have stolen IP)
(Silk can be added to the the list, after all it was called the 'Silk Road' for good reason. The Four Great Inventions were helpful for the development of European states and the bureaucracy required.)
Well, my grandgrandfather always told that those were worst Chinese inventions:
With gunpowder, came standing armies made of conscripts.
With paper, came institutionalized bureaucracy.
With money, came central banks effectively taxing every user of paper currency by printing more of it.
A modern state was made by them: conscript armies, professional bureaucrats, and central bankers
It were firearms that made "a lot of farmers with guns" a more effective fighting force than an army of professionals trained from childhood.
The "manufacturing rate" of professional bureaucracy was greatly limited by amount of gifted and trusted cadres, it was much of a matter of talent, and personality. The power of state greatly increased by eliminating the "broken phone" factor with written edicts, and allowing to hire and train less select people for bureaucratic work.
And for money, metal coin money was quite expensive to made, and it could've been smelted to make real goods - a thing of value, unlike fiat currency
A cute story, except that it's not historically accurate; conscript armies are extremely old, bureaucracy can be dated to the clay tablet era, early Chinese money was made of metal ("knife money" etc) and the history of inflationary paper disasters is usually traced to the assignats of France.
historians also sort of seem to agree that the need for a bureacracy started to exist after the argicultural revolution, which resulted in humans setteling on permanent patches of land.
Yes, want I wanted to state that it was paper that dramatically increased scale and efficiency of bureaucratic systems, allowing it to keep taps on incomparably larger number of things. It it possible for transition from hereditary class-ecclesiastic administration to professional bureaucracy.
No longer ruling the country was about a king or a man just one handshake away him touring the country and issuing edicts every few months.
Maybe you took my mention of the word 'bureaucracy' without reading the implied sarcasm, my point still stands though, the Chinese were the first to have their IP stolen. Although I am sure that, as of now, there is a little bit of give and take, not that I am proficient enough in vue.js to really know.
The West has also relied on China as a source of cheap assembly labour. And there are broader political considerations; essentially allowing China to "buy in" to the global economy rather than developing in hostile isolation. And as people have found out with the soybeans tariffs, trade wars go in both directions.
I think the question is what do they have to gain from not stealing? They’re trying to modernize and catch up, so at some point they will catch up and they won’t be able to steal anymore. At some point it would be unfair if China steals foreign tech and then sells it back, but it’s not at that point yet. Currently they steal tech to catch up, and provide cheap manual labor in return.
I think we’re complacent because this theft hasn’t actually come around to affect us yet. If China takes stolen tech and uses it internally, it’s hard to justify stopping them from doing so. If they take it and sell it on the international market, then you can use international trade agreements to enforce intellectual property laws and prevent their sale.
I think a good analogy is that China is pirating some software but not using it commercially, just personally at home, so there’s no way to really enforce compliance.
Tell that to Ericsson, who (warning: unsubstantiated claim ahead, but its a widely held industry belief) have had their entire business gutted by Huawei who basically copied entire designs from Ericsson core-mobile equipment
If we lived in caves and stole pointy sticks, it would be a wholly different crime than say me seeing you start a fire in your cave and mimicking it in my cave without paying royalties.
Intellecutal property is an advanced construct enforced wholly within the governing laws of a country, or specifically negotiated international trade agreements. Intellectual property rights are not a natural or inherent right of people.
If you'd spent your life working on an idea and once it was finalized someone elsr just swept it out of your hands and started mass-producing it, I'm sure that you'd agree that ideas and inventions do deserve protection similar to property rights
You don't need to assume that they'll only innovate for such gains.
You can avoid absolutes and simply assume that many innovators are selfish, and personal economic gains are a strong motivation that works in many cases; which seems absolutely true and is a sufficient reason why IP laws would be useful.
There are obviously other reasons. IP laws were invented before information technology, and used the fact that information travel costs both in term of space and money were higher than today, and therefore controllable on an human scale.
It is reasonable to question the whole IP system in the light of today's communications.
The interesting part, other than fitting into the "Chinese IP theft" narrative, is that:
> [He] removed electronic files with company trade secrets involving its turbine technologies and hid data files in a digital photograph of a sunset. Prosecutors say he then emailed the picture to his email account.
China has very strategic reasons to catch up in jet turbines (semiconductors is the other one), so a lot of state money and resources are directed their.
Software IP is also a problem, but it is much easier to reverse engineer or simply replicate the research (all published, open source, etc...) that IP theft isn’t very necessary. They aren’t closely guarded state secrets like jet turbine production is.
I think your conclusion is too broad. There is difference between China Government and general Chinese. I don't believe every Chinese companies want to steal from others. When you draw a conclusion, you need to distinguish facts and thinking.
I’m not sure what this has to do with my comment. But yes, the Chinese government is specifically looking to acquire foreign jet turbine technology for very obvious military reasons. So that will manifest through SOEs or very well connected private companies.
> When you draw a conclusion, you need to distinguish facts and thinking.
When thinking, be wary of the mind appending its own ideas on to other's words, like ", and by the way, every X does this too, so therefore you should consider every instance an enemy."
A nation state (whose population’s ethnicity is mostly one and the same) undertakes a massive and state sponsored campaign of corporate and military espionage, predominantly via the theft of secrets. They get caught numerous times red handed, and in most cases the thefts are perpetrated by people of the ethnicity of that state actor.
You decide that you don’t want to be a victim of such an attack - using the ethnicity of that sate actor as heuristic for likelihood to commit that theft is pretty rational - despite the fact that the actual odds of being a vicitim might be quite low (unless you make aircraft engines, Aircraft carriers, or any thing else high on their “shopping list”).
The point being if the likelihood that the average employee is a spy is 10^-7 and one of the of state actor’s ethnicity is 10^-6, on an individual basis it is essentially useless in making decisions about individuals but I know where I would spend my time if I was head of corporate security...
Someone should make a new database engine for Postgres that has stores all the data by embedding it steganographically in images and then automatically uploading them to imgur. They could then be submitted to Reddit for faster cacheing at edge locations.
Don’t let it get to you. I often find the most useful posts are heavilly downvoted on HN. Thank you for your contribution. Ignore the jerks who who have nothing better to do.
See? The topic spurred a reply with a link to an article about a politician. The way politics works in the US currently, no matter what that article says, some people agree with it, and some people will not believe it.
I’m not positing an opinion on China - merely analyzing the voting tendencies of the HN community.
I don’t see how that in anyway refutes that the issue was contentious.
It seems that you’re misunderstanding current politics… An article with actual facts in a mainstream publication doesn’t change whether other people disagree with it, in modern United States politics. You mean you haven’t noticed that?
So, by contentious, I mean that it is something that makes people emotional about which some have differing views, like politics in general. Which is why we sort of avoid discussing them an HN, I thought.
Here's an idea: EU, US, and Japan should slap a 50% tariff on all Chinese goods (made in China, or from Chinese companies). You're stealing our techs to sell products back to our markets? We're punishing you with a 50% cut first.
And then China will reply - "with a couple of recent exceptions, we ain't selling back shit - it's your companies who pay us to manufacture stuff for you, and then they sell that stuff to you for 400% the price".
And then the rest of SE Asia will reply "we'll gladly take all the manufacturing from China" And then EU, US, and Japan says "we better speed up moving out of China". And China was never heard of again.
I wonder when we as a human society can get past this silly nationalistic idea that one can steal information or technological ideas or designs. The entire concept of intellectual property is a hack to prop up industry revenues; it is not reality. The free flow of information and discoveries is essential to the advancement of the human condition.
It’s sad that more often than not, chinese hackers get this and US hackers do not.
There's a significant cost covered by the inventor as they carry the burden of trial and error which comes with developing something novel/pioneering.
Now, in the bigger picture, I agree with you that sharing knowledge and innovation benefits the greater good over longer term.
But the thing is, if you copy these novel inventions in secret, close up access to anyone else being able to benefit and establish trade embargoes then its more like stealing than copying.
It's sort of like if Aaron Schwartz sold books to private buyers instead of open sourcing them.
Without patents, pharmaceutical companies would cease to do research. Its not feasible in some sectors to do research if someone else can copy it with none of the cost
There is no indication that this GE technology is patent protected. With private "trade secrets" which can be kept wrapped indefinitely, the public never gets the benefit of disclosure while incurring the cost of monopoly. There is an argument to be made for non-patent trade secrets being an overall negative.
as US manufacturing faded away (from a peak of about 20 million jobs in the late 70's to about 12 million jobs today), the economic "good news" story promoted by the thought leaders was the that America's "true" strength was creativity and innovation. and US research universities are the best in the world.
Americans wouldn't need to make their money by building stuff. instead, they'd make their money by inventing and designing stuff and owning the IP. this IP ownership was supposed to guarantee America's prosperity into the future.
so, this silly nationalistic idea was more or less the official economic plan for American prosperity, starting in the late 1980's, i guess.
don't
mention concentration camps that would be uncouth let's
all give a hand to the fucking Hitler Youth
carefully formed and finely selected ex-
pressions like Eichmann marks on the forehead in
soul-view-only ink that don't show in mirrors
that'll be your Nazistern in the Bear Jew era
you built that shit all of it on sand and bones
that's the watershed that separates our final homes
no one's so small that if you sweep them 'neath the rug it
won't come back to bite you you cowardly fuck
upload your brain extend the age of your ass
won't change a thing what you sow comes to pass
there is no escaping the person you become they were
locked up and killed you went out and had fun
every bite you swallowed smoothly cuz you got no conscience
will be at the trial to indict you and your friends
IP theft by spies just like piracy but between businesses and governments. Governments business should try to keep secrets as much as they can, of course, but losing secrets is rarely net negative globally.
Shiao is pronounced like "shout" without the t, or "ow" (like you hurt yourself) with an sh in front of it
Ching is pretty self-explanatory. Rhymes with sing, but starts with ch.
Zheng is harder to describe. It's similar to "zing" but instead think "zeng" (with the e pronounced like the e in end). Now, to pronounce the "zh" sound try to pronounce "it's" but stop yourself at the interface between the t and the s. That is about the sound that you should be making. Don't make the sssss sound either. It's more of a z sound. Like if you saying "zzzzz" and then moved your tongue back a bit.
Why does this remind me so much of displacement of indigenous people of the Americas where the oppressors rarely acknowledge the pain of the oppressed but with the tables turned, there is so much outcry... Suppose there is a valuable lesson to be learnt. Theft, no matter how it manifests, causes distress.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make. Could you please elaborate, what exactly is the link between digital industrial espionage and the fate of the indigenous people of the Americas besides a very broad use of the generic term 'theft'?
In 2014, GE’s corporate security learned that Mr. Zheng
had copied more than 19,000 files from a GE-owned
computer to an external storage device, according to
the FBI affidavit.
In late 2017, GE discovered he had saved about 400
files on his desktop computer using encryption software
not used by the company.
I don't understand why GE would keep him employed after the first offense. Can someone who understands corporate bureaucracy explain this? Especially knowing that he was literally running a competing business in China while employed at GE.
> In late 2017, GE discovered he had saved about 400
files on his desktop computer using encryption software
not used by the company
Encrypting personal file on your laptop is probably an improper use of the company resources. But this might not be necessarily criminal. What if the guy had only encrypted his vacation pictures ?
However, you can not just go and say "Hey can you decrypt these files for us" because he will understand he got caught and can argue that he encrypted them but that was for additional safety, and it did not send or sold them.
So you want to caught him sending the data out of the company to be sure to indict/convict him. And that's what they did.
But this might not be necessarily criminal. What if the guy has only encrypted his vacation pictures ?
Fire-able offense as the laptop was company owned and such behavior sets all alarms. Once fired, they get to look at your history...
Let's admit that when dealing with IP worth tens of billions different procedures are in place, and the burden of proof for being fired /investigated is much, much lower than "beyond reasonable doubt" used to jail you.
I haven't read the Fine Article but that snippet you posted could be completely benign. I've copied "thousands of files from a company owned computer to an external storage device" on many occasions.
I was planning on working from home and my network at home would have taken hours to get all the files from source control over the corporate VPN, so I downloaded the entire source tree to a thumb drive.
Going to use a throwaway here as I'm afraid of professional repercussions, despite being from the "land of the free."
Reading the comments here are just so funny. Why is it whenever a Chinese person does something, or rather an "Asian person," it must be attributed to their culture?
Do Chinese people not have personal traits? Could this guy just not be greedy?
There are 1.4 billion Chinese people. The ones that come to the US are over achievers. It should not be surprising in a group of over achievers to have a high percentage of greedy and opportunistic people.
Recently Ron Rockwell Hansen was arrested for spying for China. I wonder what type of cultural norms caused him to do so?
This comment brings up a valid point. When I was working in academia, a lab from $large_and_famous_west_coast_university copied some code from a set of open source scripts from another lab in my field on Github, erased the Git history, and then created a new repo with a footnote in passing that they had been "inspired" by the original scripts- pretty much a textbook case of plagiarism. No one involved was Chinese (most were actually white male Europeans).
In general, high profile researchers take incredibly morally repugnant / unethical actions to get ahead.
Not using a throwaway but isn't there a difference between forking a public Github repository without attribution and stealing industrial secrets encrypted into photographs?
Yes, there is a difference, but that's because academia is not industry. Since academia's main goal is to publicize findings rather than keep them secret, plagiarism is the academic analogue of stealing "industrial secrets" and then giving them to a competitor (i.e., increasing the prestige of a rival university).
The overall effect is comparable, even if the currency (reputation instead of money) is different, and the decision to steal is still rooted in the same sense of ethics / morality.
As an addendum, it should be noted that reputation and money are not unrelated, and that when stealing ideas from other labs and taking credit for them, scientists are effectively putting on a false show for funders that can increase their ability to get grants.
It's "Open source". That's the whole point of open sourcing code. As long as the lab attached the license provided it's good. This is completely different than copying code from private internal repositories.
You're missing the point / haven't read my other comment- in the context of academia plagiarism amounts to stealing. Sure, there's nothing that's legally preventing you from copying code and passing it off as your own so long as the license is preserved, but in academia this has political and sometimes economic ramifications.
> Reading the comments here are just so funny. Why is it whenever a Chinese person does something, or rather an "Asian person," it must be attributed to their culture?
I am not seeing this as a common attitude in the comments. Save for a few, I see those blaming a government and its operatives. I think the oh-woe-is-us-stop-with-the-stereotypes is just a convenient way to detract from the story or recognize actions of a nation's government as a whole. There's not really any stereotyping going on of any real size, please don't try so to make victims.
As an exercise while you're reading these funny comments, do this: count the comments that are saying this isn't cultural and it's not about the Chinese as a culture, and compare it to the count of people that are saying this is cultural as opposed to related to the nation's government.
This is NOT a cultural thing folks. I really want to emphasize this basic basic fact. There are over 4 million Chinese Americans living here, 99% the most hardworking, honest, brilliant immigrants in America. The lowest crime, some of the highest success etc.
There are a handful of people stealing technologies though and the point I want to make it ITS STATE SPONSERED. China gives you a handbook on how exactly to steal technology and how to bring it back. The STATE SPONSERED stealing of tech in specific fields is the problem and is estimated to lose the US $150B every year according to a bipartisan report not including the rest of the world. The CIA estimates thousands of government trained espionage operatives are present in California alone, far more than any other country has had ever and this doesn’t include the Confucious Initiatives all over the country. This isn’t a Chinese problem at all, it’s the government of China specifically CCPs fault that should be countered by government policy not mistrust.
235 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadFact is, China straight up has people from the government who sit in factories reverse engineering the stuff that's built. The Chinese government (after it's been reverse engineered) helps support competitive businesses, then locks out the U.S. or other Western competitors (as it's in the national interest).
It's insane that the west has put up with this, because it's literally going to cripple the west in the long run.
Regarding this case, it's espionage essentially... But not really supprising given the prior events.
Free trade only works if you have fair trade, otherwise it is every man for themselves. Trump knows that trade with China is rigged so there is no point in having free trade with them. Most people who complain about Trump playing hardball with China are very uninformed about the reality of the situation. China is getting ready to gut the US economy from the inside out. China will make sure it never has a trade deficit with the USA. They will buy some of our stuff but only if they have a trade surplus.
https://youtu.be/axXTMUmTOyE
Innovation is great but it's mostly a buzzword to describe the aformentioned research in commercial areas
Which makes perfect sense when you consider the size of the private economy versus the share of government spending that could reasonably go to R&D (versus entitlements, military, infrastructure, etc).
Private corporations are around ~$400 billion of the ~$550 billion per year spent in the US on R&D.
The government R&D figure as a share is higher in the EU than in the US, but not dramatically so. The private sector is simply too large by comparison and can focus its resources more narrowly on things like R&D than what a government could be expected to.
The speech you are quoting also contains “information wants to be expensive” remember. It’s worth digging out the full text and reading it.
Research isn't going to pay for itself just magically.
For machinery, rarely there is anything like a "secret sauce:" Soon after the fall of USSR, Chinese defence companies flocked to Russia buying every defence tech possible. Russian companies had a funny way to troll Chicoms: they will not sell them a simple, mid-tier equipment, but only the top notch, and most complicated one, with which even they themselves had problem dealing.
For example, Soyuz transferred tech for their super expensive, small volume manufactured R179 engine. Yes, that was Soviet response to F135 class engines. The showstopper was its very high temperature turbine made with monocrystaline blades grown in situ within (!) a ceramic fibre reinforcing mesh.
Even with all blueprints, documentation of manufacturing processes, and working samples on their hands, Chinese never made a single working engine. That state program to copy R179 continues to this day as I know.
And I think they spent way more money on it in 25 years, than if they were to create a thing from scratch. That is something obvious to every experienced engineer, but not to bureaucrats from Chinese three letter agencies who are convinced that they are just an inch away from some "secret trick" that will magically make everything work.
Citation needed. That makes extremely little sense.
Please understand that unsubstantiated comments are not constructive for a fruitful discussion. Take a look at the HN guidelines for more information.
Though, my career in serious engineering companies is not that long, I don't see a thing in any serious piece of engineering that ever qualifies as non-obvious. And under serious pieces of engineering I mean things from SCADA for Baosteel's main plant, to widgets for Airbus and EADS.
Nor I ever qualify this engineering work as very laborious. Doing "Big engineering" is more about bureaucratic and legal work than doing actual engineering from my own personal impressions.
Moreover, whenever "big engineering" is involved, and you hear names like WW groups, EADS, Siemens, Rheinmetal, you don't "innovate." The cost of screwup is so high, that there are even special people employed to watch that nobody dares to replace existing working parts with their "innovation." In general, when doing such work, you want to use most proven and conservative designs over any improvements.
I'm probably going to assume too much, but I guess @baybal2 comes from a Russian background, and 95% is a meme/figure of speech there, meaning "the overwhelming majority", and doesn't refer to a specific number. It's (possibly) just a case of English as a second language or misunderstanding.
Here's a trivial example: in a physical chemistry lab I was working in, I was training a new worker how to do a particular analysis. The ISO 9001 documentation said to pipette 1000µl of the sample and 1000µl of a standard into a 2ml GC sample container, using an electronic pipetter. I got repeated accuracy to within 5 decimal places; the trainee got about 1 d.p accuracy, using the same equipment and samples. Because skill and technique matter, take time to learn and master, and those aren't in the instructions.
This applies to any process. Having the instructions aren't enough. No matter how many designs you rip off, you still need the right people with the right equipment and the right skills and techniques to fabricate it correctly, or duplicate the process exactly, etc. Industrial espionage can only take you so far. The effort required to rip off the designs and documentation might be more than the effort required to do your own design and establish your own processes. Particularly when you're otherwise inheriting other peoples design choices and you need to completely reverse engineer their thinking. In a way, it's similar to how writing software from scratch can be quicker than making a change to a huge legacy codebase. You're free of the design constraints, and you don't need waste weeks ploughing through someone else's mess to find our what those constraints are.
Another problem is the starting materials. Have a read up on the effort required to manufacture FOGBANK, a material used in nuclear warheads. The materials and process were completely documented, but the people who made it were long retired. It took over half a decade of effort to rediscover and replicate the process, not only to learn the techniques but also to discover that the process relied on an impurity in one of the materials which wasn't documented.
Not just in the heads and hands, but in the available infrastructure and supply chain as well. A classic example: SR-71 airframe documentation would probably have been nearly useless for Soviets, since they didn't have good titanium machining capability at the time (they decided to go with steel for MiG-25 airframe, for example).
Holy hell. How in the world do they pull that off while still keeping the crystal growth boundary continuous?? That sounds amazing, do you have any more information on the subject?
No, I don't,
But it is not hard to imagine. This has something to do with preventing the surface of ceramics interfering with monocrystal growth.
1. They keep the mesh temperature higher than that of melt. Knowing that both Boron and SiC fibres are grown on top of Tungsten wire, it is not that hard to imagine that you can heat them by electricity. Coreless varieties of ceramic and boron fibres are very uncommon. Very likely they used tungsten cored fibres.
2. As with anything involved with growing crystal on a crystal, one has to make sure that crystalline lattices of materials are compatible. A challenge is to marry the somewhat amorphous, and rough surface of ceramic fibres with some coating with more ordered lattice that will not disturb the monocrystal growth. Growing of crystals on top of amorphous materials is know to be doable, growing of crystals on top of another with dissimilar lattice is also known to be possible. I believe no "sci-fi" is involved there.
I believe that you can even the surface of the fibre and the coating on it with repeated acid dips and recurring grow-overs of the fibre or coating material. Once you have a fine surface on the fibre, you can use something like ALD process to produce a "dissimilar lattice interface" in a very controlled, defect free fashion.
3. You have to make sure that fibres and melt do not chemically react, or react adversely to the process. The challenge there is that at temperatures of the monocrystaline alloy melt, pretty much any material will react to some extend with it. But I think the chemistry challenge is the easiest here.
...thus validating the clickbait business model. Amazing how much we can rely upon human nature as a probability function.
Are people prepared to give up their iPhones? Actually, never mind that, are they prepared to give up Taiwan?
1. US residents and workers own pretty much zero IP/Copyrights themselves and basically zero stock in companies that own IP/Copyrights.
2. Therefore, forcing Chinese companies and consumers to "pay up" for IP and Copyrights really only benefits US companies and wealthy stockholders (not US consumers and workers).
3. If there no charge at all for this stolen IP, Chinese companies would be able to offer cheaper exported products to US workers and consumers, who would actually benefit more from the lower prices than from protecting the IP in the first place.
4. Furthermore, if US company products (e.g. Microsoft Windows) are pirated in China, it leaves the Chinese consumer with more dollars to buy other US imported goods which are not IP-focused (e.g. soybeans or almonds or wine or something) thus benefiting the average US consumer and worker more.
Here’s a personal example from about 10 years ago. Imagine that you spend several years inventing something new. You put in the sweat equity and take on opportunity costs. Then, your product seems to be ready. You’re very excited, so you decide to release it to the public at a popular trade show.
On the first day, you meet lots of interested people. Some are American, some European. Oh, and several large gatherings of Chinese people also approach your booth. They admire your invention, too. But, look, and they brought along cameras, video recorders, a few people taking notes. Your heart sinks a bit. Are they really blatantly stealing your idea with no shame? You don’t know. Then, a few months later an (inferior) but visually identical product enters the market. Then a couple more appear. They’re all priced at a fraction of the price of yours...
That was the reality a decade or two ago. Maybe it has gotten better. But, things like that have a tendency to make long impressions on the memory.
My question is: does this happen in China? Do Chinese companies steal from other Chinese companies? Is it normal for Chinese people to steal from their friends, family, neighbors? Or, is this behavior only directed at the West?
The overall situation annoys me, but congratulations to the person.
It's their culture, they don't believe in attribution nor fair trade, they're used to growing up in a red ocean. That's the way they are.
I work with Chinese companies on a regular basis, I never give them access to my repos, always uglify my JS code, and ensure strict rate limits for anything other than my office's IP address and carefully monitor access logs from their IPs and always implement kill switches in my software. I know what I'm doing isn't going to stop them if they wanted to, but for most part, it keeps them at bay.
Just watch out if you work in an industry where your IP is everything.
https://jalopnik.com/mercedes-parent-company-daimler-dismant...
The Oreo White Case
The Motorola Case
The Iowa Seed Corn Case
The Tappy the Robo Case
The CLIFBAW Case
The Allen Ho TVA/Nuclear Power Case
The File Storage and China National Health Case
The Unit 61398 Case
The Great Firewall Case
http://www.prosperousamerica.org/top_ten_cases_of_chinese_ip...
If you had to work with me, would you actively try to obfuscate your work because you believe at a cultural level that I'm keen to steal?
I've clearly explained my stance with Chinese companies. Ie. Companies from China.
I've never mentioned anything at a personal level in my original comment. That's your mis-interpretation. Sorry.
You said nasty things about Chinese companies because a US citizen stole IP from GE. And then you wonder why a Chinese-born US would be wary of working with you.
Hence, I clearly mentioned why I don't trust Chinese companies, whereas the misinterpretation here is automatically the assumption that I have a problem with Chinese as a race, which isn't true.
Nothing personal, but slightly higher than average probability that you maintain enough ties to home to be persuaded in one form or another by the superpower pouring immense resources into doing exactly that.
Imagine being a Chinese citizen who reads the news a lot and every couple months, they read a story about how an American or a “Western” person living in China stole some IP from a Chinese company.
How do you think they’re going to feel about Americans and Westerners?
With this in mind, I wouldn’t blame a person if they were more distrustful of a Chinese coworker than say, a British coworker.
This is how it works, unfortunately.
The Chinese guy working at the deli where I get my coffee is probably not a state-sponsored spy.
Is that your fault? Nope. But my intellectual property is more valuable than your personal feelings being hurt.
While I too find their blatant copying annoying and reprobate, you have to consider how they must view the West and its interference–to put it mildly–in their relatively-recent past.
Literally bombarding nations that don't want to trade with you?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzungar_genocide [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Great_Campaigns
Why doesn't the same apply to Germany?
It does apply to Germany...after the first world war. The Germans didn'f feel shafted after the second world war because someone was paying attention during the interwar period and figured helping with the rebuilding and not inflaming tensions was a better idea.
Yeah our (US) civilization has plenty of flaws, I'm not meaning to suggest otherwise. Just saying since you asked, if it seems they are targeting the US a lot, this could be part of it. Plus the obvious fact that the US is the biggest and softest target.
In China, the manager class, the bureaucrat class have an opinion of their own people as worthless.
They don't believe that a Chinese engineer can make a widget better than an American engineer, because they think there is something inherently wrong with everything Chinese.
In their disturbed minds, they think if everything Chinese is bad, this also makes them bad too. Thus, they make themselves appear as un-Chinese as possible:
See, the only place in the world where American car brands making "falling apart as you drive" cars made a dent in the market is China!
In reality though, this conduct of theirs, acquiring material attributes of "Americanness" themselves, is just a psychological compensation.
I'm not trying to insult anybody here. This is my observation from working in trade with China for 10 years, and living there for 3 years.
What needs to be fixed, is the toxic "Laoban" culture, an "old boys club" of inept, privileged, people currently running China.
A real world example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217995
Is this largely a generation-specific culture, that will mostly pass on as the generation dies off, or embedded within the Chinese culture itself, and has a far greater inertial momentum to overcome and thus will take much longer to turn around (perhaps even generations of change)? My gut feel from my general reading is this is an intrinsic part of Chinese culture, though slowly changing starting at the more youth-oriented demographic-populated fringes that interact the most with the outside world.
That hasn't been reality in a LONG time. And even at their worst, American cars were still light years ahead of what China has managed to produce thus far.
2) If you are reading US news then you only have access to the biggest international stories since everything else is deemed irrelevant, e.g. [1] "Train Makers Rail Against China's High-Speed Designs"
3) Chinese companies simply buy companies in other countries to gain access to knowledge (Volvo)
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704814204575507...
We don't hear about it because it's a national matter and only the national news outlets cover it.
https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlant...
All countries in the world strive to "steal" tech from those that have it. USA itself "stole" the designs of industrial mills and presses and machine tools from Britain while it was forbidden with capital punishment.
Th USA also "stole" nuclear tech from Germany, that was the first to fission the atom or the first to create semiconductor diodes. They just gave the guys working on that on Europe much better quality of life. The jet engines of Germany (operation Paperclip), their rockets, the chemical industry traveled to the US after the war.
Today the US spy on communications worldwide and the biggest application for it is industrial espionage. With things like Intel ME on every computer or your real name registered on it, it becomes extremely simple to steal the designs created on those computers when you have control of this hardware(intel is an American company and they are required to "cooperate" with secret services).
If it is so simple, so how does it work? (It might or might not happen, but it is certainly not simple or known)
Maybe it's language related.
I'm Chinese, and I can tell you there are many people in the dark corners of China's Internet are talking about similar kind of things: Spy stories, military secrets, dark politics & histories, rumors etc. Basic human nature. But if you don't read Chinese and look into the right place, you'll simply unaware of their existence.
I don't think all English speakers can also speak or read German, so maybe that's the reason, rather than "They just don't care".
I'd suggest that China is beginning to match US creativity with software -- a quick glance at the rising popularity of several github repositories that have Mandarin README's would confirm this. https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-ar...
Also, Vue.js seems to have a lot of Chinese contribution.
Their Google, FB and Twitter knock-offs seem to be doing good too.
Their Google, FB, and Twitter knockoffs don't count, they are all crap compared to Western versions. The only reason the Chinese versions are alive is because the competition is blocked.
I'm not suggesting Chinese people aren't good, there's plenty of them working on top tier stuff outside of China. What I am suggesting is that China's policy of crippling the internet has consequences. As long as their internet is crippled China will lag the rest of the world in software.
Tencent has $35b in revenue and Baidu has $12b revenue (USD). Meanwhile Twitter has $0.7b in revenue (for reference, FB is $40b).
Yes Twitter appeals more to me but just because I'm not the target market of those Chinese platforms doesn't mean they are crap. They make real money and work for their users.
To address the sibling comment by kuwze, the reason why Tencent is successful in payments is because the Chinese government blocked everyone competing with it, and also because the Chinese market lacked credit cards. Same thing for Alibaba. It's similar to how African countries went straight to mobile before more developed places did, and nobody holds those carriers up as examples of innovation. If we didn't already have complete acceptance of credit cards we would probably be using wallets from Microsoft or Amazon or some other tech giant.
I have to respect Alibaba on the e-commerce though. In my opinion they're better than Amazon. Their software is dismal compared to Amazon, but when you measure them by the range of products you can get delivered, how fast and inexpensively, it's clearly superior, and they enjoy no protection from competition by Amazon. Alibaba is really great, the best perk of living in China hands down. Didi is cool too, though like all the copy cats it's just crap as a software company compared to Uber or Lyft.
So anyway, no disrespect to the business savvy of China's big tech. And I also see that there's some awesome units in them. For example, Tencent has some absolutely fantastic security groups. All I'm saying is that China's tech giants didn't get here by technical innovation, whereas America's did. And not only that, China's internet policy has the side effect of crushing innovation so we're not likely to see anything interesting spring from there.
- (this is handling double 11 traffic! if you don't know what that means, a few X prime day traffic) https://medium.com/@alitech_2017/open-source-pouch-alibabas-...
- from BAIDU http://apollo.auto/
Wechat is a killer mobile app, no web red herring. look at FB's app, so awkward.
Disclaimer: I worked for one of FAANG and it's not that easy to adopt new things.
I know what singles day is about. I'm unconvinced by your arguments, but will concede that it's not a good idea to for the US to drive good talent away with shitty immigration policy.
Have you used Alibaba's cloud service? Why is it as clunky as a second rate shared hosting service from 15 years ago? Can you explain that to me?
Also, given the fact that I have to go through insane bureaucracy just to get an account on it, what do the tech kids of China have the option to do except publish miniprograms on WeChat? Is China really going to be a leader based on returning engineers from the US?
Apollo's code looks pretty interesting. Will keep an eye on that. Funny though, I'm having trouble browsing the site. Requests fail half the time. Oh look, it's hosted by Baidu.. no wonder.
This breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to call names in arguments. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here. Your comment would be fine without that first sentence.
Dubbo - 20,634 stars - https://github.com/apache/incubator-dubbo
FastJSON - 14,483 stars - https://github.com/alibaba/fastjson
RocketMQ - 4,962 stars - https://github.com/apache/rocketmq
https://github.com/iikira/BaiduPCS-Go
https://github.com/Jannchie/Historical-ranking-data-visualiz...
Just to name 3. You can see them on https://github.com/trending when filtering by langauge
Can you think of an example that is widely popular and not trivial? Is there some software related thing that originated from China that is just so fundamentally important that the rest of the world could not resist copying it or building on it?
I'm willing to bet you have never heard of Aamir Khan -- but considering how much of the world is a fan of him (largely in China and India) he is considered by Forbes & Newsweek to be the biggest movie star in the world (attribution: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2017/10/05/heres-why-aa... )
I think the same can go with software. Just because it's not popular in the West (and it's not discussed widely on Hacker News or trade mags/sites) doesn't mean it's not very popular worldwide.
My only point (originally) was that Nationalism and confirmation bias can cloud objective judgement about something. Is your point that that Chinese software is at best 'trivial'? (If not, please clarify)
The article also mentions the previous Nanya case that made national headlines in Taiwan. These incidents don't make it on Hacker News or US media, though.
No business could survive and make long-term plans and large capital investment if that's how the world actually worked.
How about walking out of an accounting firm with private business files and handing them to competitors for a fee? Still not information stealing?
If I take your car, you biggest concern is that you don't have a car now. If I somehow copied your car, you probably wouldn't care too much.
If I take your banking info, your concern is that I have a copy. That you didn't lose your copy is a lesser concern than that I have a copy and the damage I can do with that copy.
While these two things seem related, they do seem different enough that having a different word to differentiate them.
Taking a copy of something which is available to buy without paying is perhaps depriving the company of one sale, or not if you weren’t going to buy it but would happen to look at it for free. In some cases this free copy can even have positive net expected value, e.g. in the case where you read a book or watch a movie without paying for it and then tell people how great it is.
However in the case of stealing trade secrets it directly undercuts the entire value proposotion of the company, particularly since trade secrets are not patented so anyone is free to replicate the result and sell it in the marketplace, presuming that they independently invented the same process.
So taking a copy of a trade secret is considered espionage or corporate warfare and is a direct attack on a company in a way that personally ripping a copy of DVD doesn’t come close.
Would the ability of the company to challenge the sharing of the game really make a major distinction, especially since it would be possible to host the website in a country that doesn't care enough to take it down?
Of course, in the case in the linked article, I think it is reasonable to assume this wasn't done just for sating some curiosity.
"Conversion" is a tort (so, not a criminal offense) in which one party deprives another party of control over the second party's lawful property. It can involve physically taking the property, but could also involve otherwise depriving the rightful owner of control over it.
Taking someone's proprietary data and passing it to a competitor strikes me as a fair example of conversion, since it deprives the rightful owner of control -- they cannot, once the information has been taken and passed on, exercise control over it by keeping it exclusively to themselves. The value of the information has been destroyed.
It also covers situations in which the property has not actually been removed, but access to it by its rightful owner has been denied. E.g., encrypting files on your employer's computer such that your employer can't access them, but not actually removing them. (This is sort of equivalent to going to a warehouse and putting a lock, that only you have the key to, on a container holding someone else's stuff.)
The intriguing thing about Conversion, which I've always thought was interesting, is that it's independent of intent. Unlike the criminal acts of theft, where there's an issue of mens rea, conversion can occur without any intent -- the deprivation can happen as a consequence of some other action, but you can still be liable for some remedies, under some conditions.
There's centuries of caselaw about conversion and the traditional remedies for it ("trover" and "replevin"), much of it designed expressly to discourage vigilantism in the premodern and early industrial world. I think we could learn something from this, particularly as cyber crime becomes more common.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44489797
IP theft is also a problem in Europe, Australia, etc, but again, the news doesn’t reach us often.
Well at least they pay lipservice.
Reimplementing what Nortel had is non-trivial, but look at where Freeswitch and Asterisk are today. The closed competitors are limping along, with most repackaging the two main open source solutions.
This worries me as much as this article, because it make people associate China and Chinese companies with unfriendly behaviours.
If you say "not all", you are called a government shill. The same goes with articles trying to point out discrimination in US university admissions.
This is not posted to create dissent, but to reduce exclusion or invalidation that other reader may feel.
Maybe I should say differently: if you replace "asian" by "jewish" or "black" and the phrase sounds horribly racist, maybe that is because it is racist in the first place. Please do not do that.
Or you can buy Xilinx FPGAs, which are available with PPC-compatible cores built right in.
Or you steal the source code, instead of the deployment binaries.
Same thing is going on with "piracy", in Germany they actually coined the term "Raubkopie" (robbed copy) which implies that a copy is taken by violent force.
It’s theft. Handbags to manufacturing techniques. Source code to schematics. Science to business models. It’s all meant to prop up local business. Pin duo duo just had their IPO. Now there’s so many fakes and copies that no one knows what’s real on their anymore.
Didi vs Uber is a great example. Didi copied the idea, took government subsidies. But then the government stole the competition completely by shutting down Uber and forcing a merger with Didi.
If you redefine it like that, then competition itself is theft. After all, if I start competing with you, I deprive you of revenue/profits by forcing you to decrease your margins...
You are depriving the victim of earnings associated with the IP, market position, sales opportunites, all the while sticking them with r&d expenses, which happens even if you are making a copy for personal use.
-You believe ideas are properties. IP means Intellectual property.
-Ideas could be stolen, like any property, that is you take ownership of something letting the original owner without the ability to use it.
Europe and then US were developed copying and improving on the ideas of others. E.g Romans looked at people with mining knowledge and conquered them to acquire the knowledge(and the mines). They did the same with Greece. Toledo's steel real origin was a secret so Romans would not conquer them.
Europe benefited from ideas like powder manufacturing and improved over that creating dynamite. They improved over compasses making them suitable for sea navigation. Original compasses from China were terrible.
Britain copied the ideas and knowledge that lead to industrialization from the Netherlands, who had taken it from the rest of Europe, being at the end of a big river.
Then the US copied from England. Native Americans were exterminated as they could not copy the new ideas fast enough in order to defend themselves.
The thing that changed in Taiwan is they started building industries where they needed to produce their own intellectual property. As that became more important, they started seeing the value of respecting IP.
With software piracy, the government got so serious about it, they instituted fines for businesses set at 400x the price of any software being pirated. So a pirated copy of Windows used by a bank, say, could get very expensive very fast... perhaps still cheaper than buying Windows for every computer but presumably that purchase would be part of the corrective action mandated, with the fine being on top of that.
But... Taiwan has a democratically elected government, not whatever system China has (I truly don't know, because it's so opaque... it's certainly not communist). Results may be different.
You could say this about any place, in any time in history. And anyone who can offer something more substantive either doesn't dare to speak freely if they are in China or have friends or relatives there, or weren't even born because their free-thinking grandparents were murdered, am I wrong?
Seriously, you can stop right after "I am a Chinese and I am not comfortable" -- how could you possibly be. You're generations into deformation by totalitarian leaders, and that's the first thing they take. Where human lives are worth nothing, a "growing awareness of IP", which isn't even a growing respect, just an awareness, is not going to do shit in the big scheme, and doing "just better" is saying nothing other than putting a focus on not wanting to be explicit. Maybe you meant to say "much", but then bit your tongue, I don't know. But "just better", to me when I read it, has in ellipsis the question "better how?" before it.
Anyway, you can't expect a country to treat citizens of other countries better than its own. I'm German and tired of ignorance and whiny kiddos playing with fire that can consume us all, kthx. Been there, done that, heard all of it, reject it completely.
I hope they never do, and continue to ignore the western concepts of IP or copyright. The culture is just different, and that doesn't make it any better or worse.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3107
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
Or, as someone I know said, "Chinese civilization has survived for over 3000 years."
Now China is getting into the territory of having something to lose, between pressure from trade partners and internal forces, it'll eventually fall in line with other developed countries.
That being said, sino-phobia in US may or may not get better, depends on how US economy is doing, and if a new arch-enemy emerges to direct public anger at.
In the same way a lot of forward-looking people are seeing a future were full-time work will have to be replaced by some form of Universal Basic Income, I wonder when we'll realize the whole IP / Copyright / "It's mine, you can't have it" mentality will have to be replaced.
I mean, looks like it worked out great for them. I'm just not sure why Western governments don't retaliate, e.g. by taxing Chinese exports and investments (i.e. similar to what Trump is trying to do now, but more targeted - e.g. specifically target companies that have stolen IP)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Great_Inventions
(Silk can be added to the the list, after all it was called the 'Silk Road' for good reason. The Four Great Inventions were helpful for the development of European states and the bureaucracy required.)
With gunpowder, came standing armies made of conscripts.
With paper, came institutionalized bureaucracy.
With money, came central banks effectively taxing every user of paper currency by printing more of it.
A modern state was made by them: conscript armies, professional bureaucrats, and central bankers
It were firearms that made "a lot of farmers with guns" a more effective fighting force than an army of professionals trained from childhood.
The "manufacturing rate" of professional bureaucracy was greatly limited by amount of gifted and trusted cadres, it was much of a matter of talent, and personality. The power of state greatly increased by eliminating the "broken phone" factor with written edicts, and allowing to hire and train less select people for bureaucratic work.
And for money, metal coin money was quite expensive to made, and it could've been smelted to make real goods - a thing of value, unlike fiat currency
No longer ruling the country was about a king or a man just one handshake away him touring the country and issuing edicts every few months.
I think a good analogy is that China is pirating some software but not using it commercially, just personally at home, so there’s no way to really enforce compliance.
There are lots of arguments for rethinking how intellectual property works, 'look at all those people' is probably not one of the good ones.
If we lived in caves and stole pointy sticks, it would be a wholly different crime than say me seeing you start a fire in your cave and mimicking it in my cave without paying royalties.
Intellecutal property is an advanced construct enforced wholly within the governing laws of a country, or specifically negotiated international trade agreements. Intellectual property rights are not a natural or inherent right of people.
You can avoid absolutes and simply assume that many innovators are selfish, and personal economic gains are a strong motivation that works in many cases; which seems absolutely true and is a sufficient reason why IP laws would be useful.
It is reasonable to question the whole IP system in the light of today's communications.
> [He] removed electronic files with company trade secrets involving its turbine technologies and hid data files in a digital photograph of a sunset. Prosecutors say he then emailed the picture to his email account.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/08/01/us/ap-us-general...
Edit: Thanks for the downvotes?
Lots of Chinese companies don't steal IP and invest heavily in R&D, and they want to contribute. On Github, many contributors are from China.
Software IP is also a problem, but it is much easier to reverse engineer or simply replicate the research (all published, open source, etc...) that IP theft isn’t very necessary. They aren’t closely guarded state secrets like jet turbine production is.
When thinking, be wary of the mind appending its own ideas on to other's words, like ", and by the way, every X does this too, so therefore you should consider every instance an enemy."
Regardless of culture, no other nationality really has near the opportunity to profit by stealing technology and returning with it to their homeland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
You decide that you don’t want to be a victim of such an attack - using the ethnicity of that sate actor as heuristic for likelihood to commit that theft is pretty rational - despite the fact that the actual odds of being a vicitim might be quite low (unless you make aircraft engines, Aircraft carriers, or any thing else high on their “shopping list”).
The point being if the likelihood that the average employee is a spy is 10^-7 and one of the of state actor’s ethnicity is 10^-6, on an individual basis it is essentially useless in making decisions about individuals but I know where I would spend my time if I was head of corporate security...
Are you seriously going with the "what about all the Chinese who didn't steal IP" defense?
I’m not positing an opinion on China - merely analyzing the voting tendencies of the HN community.
It's a direct refutation of your allegation that the "Chinese IP Theft Narrative" is contentious.
It seems that you’re misunderstanding current politics… An article with actual facts in a mainstream publication doesn’t change whether other people disagree with it, in modern United States politics. You mean you haven’t noticed that?
So, by contentious, I mean that it is something that makes people emotional about which some have differing views, like politics in general. Which is why we sort of avoid discussing them an HN, I thought.
It’s sad that more often than not, chinese hackers get this and US hackers do not.
Now, in the bigger picture, I agree with you that sharing knowledge and innovation benefits the greater good over longer term.
But the thing is, if you copy these novel inventions in secret, close up access to anyone else being able to benefit and establish trade embargoes then its more like stealing than copying.
It's sort of like if Aaron Schwartz sold books to private buyers instead of open sourcing them.
Americans wouldn't need to make their money by building stuff. instead, they'd make their money by inventing and designing stuff and owning the IP. this IP ownership was supposed to guarantee America's prosperity into the future.
so, this silly nationalistic idea was more or less the official economic plan for American prosperity, starting in the late 1980's, i guess.
Corporate Counterintelligence and Cybersecurity Services is growing business area.
Lots of Chinese companies don't steal IP and invest heavily in R&D, and they want to contribute. On Github, many contributors are from China.
this pronunciation is so off it offends me
Should be pronounced like this:
Shiao - Ching - Zheng
Shiao is pronounced like "shout" without the t, or "ow" (like you hurt yourself) with an sh in front of it
Ching is pretty self-explanatory. Rhymes with sing, but starts with ch.
Zheng is harder to describe. It's similar to "zing" but instead think "zeng" (with the e pronounced like the e in end). Now, to pronounce the "zh" sound try to pronounce "it's" but stop yourself at the interface between the t and the s. That is about the sound that you should be making. Don't make the sssss sound either. It's more of a z sound. Like if you saying "zzzzz" and then moved your tongue back a bit.
"Sheow Ching Jung" is a better approximation.
I strongly disagree... what makes you say that, Nick Garvey?
http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-...
Based on your description:
ʃaʊ - ʨ̑ɪŋ - ʒɛ̃ŋ
Sometimes you identify, feed them false information, and watch who they talk to...
Sometimes you screw up.
There can be good reasons for GE/FBI/CIA to let a spy keep their job.
Encrypting personal file on your laptop is probably an improper use of the company resources. But this might not be necessarily criminal. What if the guy had only encrypted his vacation pictures ?
However, you can not just go and say "Hey can you decrypt these files for us" because he will understand he got caught and can argue that he encrypted them but that was for additional safety, and it did not send or sold them.
So you want to caught him sending the data out of the company to be sure to indict/convict him. And that's what they did.
Fire-able offense as the laptop was company owned and such behavior sets all alarms. Once fired, they get to look at your history...
Let's admit that when dealing with IP worth tens of billions different procedures are in place, and the burden of proof for being fired /investigated is much, much lower than "beyond reasonable doubt" used to jail you.
I was planning on working from home and my network at home would have taken hours to get all the files from source control over the corporate VPN, so I downloaded the entire source tree to a thumb drive.
Reading the comments here are just so funny. Why is it whenever a Chinese person does something, or rather an "Asian person," it must be attributed to their culture?
Do Chinese people not have personal traits? Could this guy just not be greedy?
There are 1.4 billion Chinese people. The ones that come to the US are over achievers. It should not be surprising in a group of over achievers to have a high percentage of greedy and opportunistic people.
Recently Ron Rockwell Hansen was arrested for spying for China. I wonder what type of cultural norms caused him to do so?
This comment brings up a valid point. When I was working in academia, a lab from $large_and_famous_west_coast_university copied some code from a set of open source scripts from another lab in my field on Github, erased the Git history, and then created a new repo with a footnote in passing that they had been "inspired" by the original scripts- pretty much a textbook case of plagiarism. No one involved was Chinese (most were actually white male Europeans).
In general, high profile researchers take incredibly morally repugnant / unethical actions to get ahead.
The overall effect is comparable, even if the currency (reputation instead of money) is different, and the decision to steal is still rooted in the same sense of ethics / morality.
I am not seeing this as a common attitude in the comments. Save for a few, I see those blaming a government and its operatives. I think the oh-woe-is-us-stop-with-the-stereotypes is just a convenient way to detract from the story or recognize actions of a nation's government as a whole. There's not really any stereotyping going on of any real size, please don't try so to make victims.
As an exercise while you're reading these funny comments, do this: count the comments that are saying this isn't cultural and it's not about the Chinese as a culture, and compare it to the count of people that are saying this is cultural as opposed to related to the nation's government.
There are a handful of people stealing technologies though and the point I want to make it ITS STATE SPONSERED. China gives you a handbook on how exactly to steal technology and how to bring it back. The STATE SPONSERED stealing of tech in specific fields is the problem and is estimated to lose the US $150B every year according to a bipartisan report not including the rest of the world. The CIA estimates thousands of government trained espionage operatives are present in California alone, far more than any other country has had ever and this doesn’t include the Confucious Initiatives all over the country. This isn’t a Chinese problem at all, it’s the government of China specifically CCPs fault that should be countered by government policy not mistrust.