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Knockoff Tech Selling Better Than the Original

Posted by Zonk on from the that's-gotta-hurt dept.

An anonymous reader writes to mention an IT Wire story about the industrious Chinese industry centered around reproducing commercial products. These individuals have become so adept at forging based on the original that by the time the developer of the technology comes to market, the 'original' is seen as 'fake' by consumers. Other products, such as shoes, CDs, DVDs, and even expensive cars are available for much lower prices in certain Chinese markets. From the article: "Sell these products do, especially in Asia where the prices are low, few questions are asked and in many cases, the quality is actually pretty good. Samsung is said to have been so concerned by seeing its phones copied on the Chinese market that it tracked the distribution channels back to the source and discovered the electronics guys responsible for copying their latest products. After offering them a job with Samsung and a chance to go legitimate, they are reported to have declined the offer, saying that they were able to make more money by simply continuing in their pirate ways. What Samsung did next is not known."

321 comments

  1. In the west too! by bogaboga · · Score: 1

    These products are plentiful in the west too! In Canada, one only has to visit the so called Dollar Stores to see them.

    1. Re:In the west too! by TubeSteak · · Score: 1

      I don't know about Canada, but in a lot of Countries, people seem to assume (not always correctly) that "you get what you pay for".

      Maybe it is different in countries (like China) where piracy is so prevalent, that the pirates actually have competition in the form of other pirates, with the end result being higher quality knock offs.

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
    2. Re:In the west too! by diersing · · Score: 1

      Tis the free market at work, although for as much as Bush wants to see market forces drive innovation, its copying or near-reproductions that rule in a free market system. Innovation must be clouded in secrecy or wrapped in mountains of patents (and their lawyers) to succeed in such a system. Of course, certain things (oil, air travel, power, etc) must be protected and regulated and subsidized if necessary (although who defines necessary is an issue) for reasons all together not plain to me as long as monopolies are kept in some sort of check.

    3. Re:In the west too! by KDR_11k · · Score: 1

      What I get and pay for with more expensive products is usually brand names and advertising budgets, or at least that's how I feel.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    4. Re:In the west too! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And remember to pick up your mighty pirates play set, where they have the cast head shots of pirates of the carribean but in this one Johnny Depp has a photo-shopped eye patch that you can still see through.

      It also includes Ninja Sai and sickle???

      Or The pirate toy set that the background has cowboys in the desert????

      I have to admit I love those knock off products.

      May favorite memory of them is a mother coming back with a transformer knock-off. you know the set that combined to make the huge construction set. It was that one but it was only 4 bucks. While the original goes for like 80. She said she wanted a refund because they were of such poor quality that her son broke them when he threw them against the car door.

      Ah Memories.

    5. Re:In the west too! by arivanov · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why the dollar store. Just every foodstore in good old USA. What do you thing American Budweiser is? A badly done fake imitation of the real Budweiser brewed in the Chech republic for 300+ years now.

      China is simply undergoing the same process as the USA did 120-130 years ago. The only difference is that American "businessmen" at the time were faking European brand goods while Chinese are now faking Japanese and American.

      Nothing surprising here. Once their own brands appear in quantity they will suddenly become trade mark aware. The way the USA did.

      --
      Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
      http://www.sigsegv.cx/
    6. Re:In the west too! by tqk · · Score: 1
      I don't know about Canada, but in a lot of Countries, people seem to assume (not always correctly) that "you get what you pay for".

      Maybe it is different in countries (like China) where piracy is so prevalent, that the pirates actually have competition in the form of other pirates, with the end result being higher quality knock offs.

      It's a status/fashion thing. Those buying the $100 T-shirts believe they have a right to expect you paid $100 for your $100 T-shirt.
      --
      "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
    7. Re:In the west too! by Guido+von+Guido · · Score: 2, Informative
      Why the dollar store. Just every foodstore in good old USA. What do you thing American Budweiser is? A badly done fake imitation of the real Budweiser brewed in the Chech republic for 300+ years now.


      Beer is a bad example. Brewing is a trade, and trademarks do not protect beer styles. It's a recipe. There are restrictions on what you can call your beer.


      Many of the American brewers who "knocked off" European styles were actually immigrants themselves. Adolphus Busch (who we have to blame for Budweiser) himself was a German immigrant, coming to America when he was around 18 and then marrying Lilly Anhueser. Many of their products were somewhat different than their German equivalents, and based on recipes recovered (such as the Classic American Pilsner were quite good. American brewing didn't become terrible until after Prohibition.


      On another note, Bud is--believe it or not--very difficult to brew. It's damn hard to remove all the flavor from the beer like that without showcasing other flaws. This is purely anecdotal, but I can think of at least one ex-Anhueser-Busch brewer who has done quite well after going out on his own. The brewmaster at one of my favorite local breweries used to be a production supervisor at Anhueser-Busch, and he makes excellent, flavorful and award-winning beers.


      Finally, 300+ years? Budvar has been brewing for much longer than that, but their beers were nothing like they are now . The first pilsners (like Budweiser Budvar) weren't brewed until the 1840s. As an aside, brewers all over the world (including Germany, of course) quickly imitated the first pilsners produced.


      But you're right, Budwar Budweiser is a hell of a lot better than Anhueser-Busch Budweiser.

    8. Re:In the west too! by bogado · · Score: 1

      Beer is a bad example. Brewing is a trade, and trademarks do not protect beer styles. It's a recipe. There are restrictions on what you can call your beer.

      I'm confused, why a recipe of beer is different from a shoe design? The only difference I can see is that the recipe is noticeable by your taste/smell sense while the shoe design appeals to the touch and vision senses.
      --
      []'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins

      ^[:wq

    9. Re:In the west too! by Sique · · Score: 1

      And especially Budweiser is a very bad example, because Anheuser-Busch is some decades older than Budvar, which was founded in 1895. Ironically Anheuser-Busch making money of the fact, that they were selling Budweiser hinted to the local czech people of Ceske Budejovice that the type of beer they were drinking for themselves (the Germans living in Böhmisch Budweis at the same time normally didn't drink beer following the Budweiser recipe, since the Lager beer was invented in Pilsen and thus you could drink beer from other sources than the local breweries), might have something for it, so they founded a brewery to brew czech beer for czech people. In a twist of history the fact that the Budweiser beer recipe went overseas and became a wellknown brand was the root cause for the Budweiser recipe to finally become a brand in its home town.

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
    10. Re:In the west too! by g8oz · · Score: 1

      Beer is a bad example. A better one is the growth of the American chemical industry after WWI when the U.S government invalidated all the patents held by German firms.

      Dupont and friends would have never had the success they have had if they hadn't ripped off German IP.

    11. Re:In the west too! by Richard+Steiner · · Score: 1

      It took many months and tremendous expense for European goods to make it to the American colonies back in the 17th-19th centuries, so recreating European products was often the only viable way to obtain such products locally. I'm not convinced that the same is true for China today.

      --
      Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
      The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
    12. Re:In the west too! by ccp · · Score: 1
      I'm confused, why a recipe of beer is different from a shoe design?

      You surely are, because you're talking about two wholly different levels of abstraction.
      The shoe's design is the product. It's an integral part of it, and you cannot look at the product without seeing the design.
      On the other hand, a recipe is a way to make a product. It's not part of the product, and you cannot extract the recipe from the product. Of course, you can guess, and the better your knowledge of the problem domain, the better your guess will be. But still just a guess.

      Cheers,
      Carlos Cesar
    13. Re:In the west too! by bogado · · Score: 1

      You can see how a shoe is made just by looking at it? Wow, incredible. How can you tell exact what kind of materials are used and what are the specifications on elasticity and hardness on those, just by looking. Design is more that how it looks, I would believe that, if someone has a skill in shoe making and he could study the shoe carefully, this person could make a shoe that looks like it, if he has a very good team of engineers they could even make one that would fool most people.

      I don't think that the design of something is different from a recipe. The design is the way something looks along with what are the materials and how to bind them to make it into a final product in the same way that a recipe for beer states the ingredients and how to mix them.

      --
      []'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins

      ^[:wq

    14. Re:In the west too! by ccp · · Score: 1


      You can see how a shoe is made just by looking at it? Wow, incredible.

      Incredible to you, maybe, but about shoes I happen to know a little.
      A cousin of mine makes shoes (and very fancy ones, may I add) for a living, and take my word for it, making shoes is not rocket science.

      He, and just ONE artisan who works for him deconstruct and knock off a competitor's model, with some improvements, in one lazy afternoon.
      Of course, his competitors do the same with HIS designs. The winner? The buying public, I guess.

      Cheers,
      CC

    15. Re:In the west too! by bogado · · Score: 1

      Cool. :-D Very cool. :-) This works even for those super-techs running shoes with "air systems" stuff? I aways imagined those were just a marketing scheme... :-D

      But this don't invalidate my reasoning, being it is easy to copy (or reverse engineer) does not make a design different from a recipe. Just think in a chip design in the place of a shoe, for instance.

      --
      []'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins

      ^[:wq

    16. Re:In the west too! by ccp · · Score: 1
      Cool. :-D Very cool. :-)

      Lucky you, we're pretty hot here in the Southern hemisphere. Summer is coming!

      This works even for those super-techs running shoes with "air systems" stuff? I aways imagined those were just a marketing scheme... :-D

      You always imagined right. ;>)

      But this don't invalidate my reasoning, being it is easy to copy (or reverse engineer) does not make a design different from a recipe. Just think in a chip design in the place of a shoe, for instance.

      But seriously...

      Designs and recipes are two different conceptual categories.

      A design is what something is. A blueprint, if you want. The difficulty in deconstructing it is irrelevant.
      It may be very easy (a shoe), or very difficuly (a chip), but when you've reverse engineered it, you're done. That's all that there is.

      On the other side, a recipe is a way to make something. A process. An algorithm.
      It may be very easy (my secret barbecue sauce), or very difficult (some weird biochemical process), but the point is you can only guess. An educated guess, hopefully, but a guess all the same. You can never be sure, you compare the results, and guess a little more.

      So, you can have a recipe that's easy to guess, and a design that's impossible to deconstruct, but they're still very different things.

      Cheers,

      Carlos Cesar
    17. Re:In the west too! by bogado · · Score: 1

      Lucky you, we're pretty hot here in the Southern hemisphere. Summer is coming!who said anything about being in the north? I live in Rio de Janeiro, the weather is not, yet, at 40C but it is very hot and humid here, this means you sweat a lot. Designs and recipes are two different conceptual categories.

      A design is what something is. A blueprint, if you want. The difficulty in deconstructing it is irrelevant.
      It may be very easy (a shoe), or very difficuly (a chip), but when you've reverse engineered it, you're done. That's all that there is.I don't know if I am too generalist, but to me a blueprint is a recipe that tells me where to put each ingredient (component). :-) Maybe I'm just wrong in doing it, but I don't see why the law should protect one and not the other, or vice versa. :-)

      --
      []'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins

      ^[:wq

    18. Re:In the west too! by ccp · · Score: 1
      I don't know if I am too generalist, but to me a blueprint is a recipe that tells me where to put each ingredient (component). :-)

      Well, the recipe tells you not only what and where, but also when and how... ;>)

      Maybe I'm just wrong in doing it, but I don't see why the law should protect one and not the other, or vice versa. :-)

      My personal opinion would be neither, so at least in this point we seem to agree. :-)

      Saludos desde Tigre, Argentina

      CC
  2. Microsoft... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Microsoft could take a few lessons from these guys...

    1. Re:Microsoft... by LaughingCoder · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Microsoft could take a few lessons from these guys...
      They have ... hence Genuine Windows Advantage and other such protection schemes.
      --
      The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
    2. Re:Microsoft... by kz45 · · Score: 1

      "Microsoft could take a few lessons from these guys..."

      There is no difference between a pirated microsoft product and the original. Unlike hardware companies like samsung, Microsoft would basically just be competing with themselves, which is why they now have the genuine advantage program and other protections.

    3. Re:Microsoft... by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Stealing someone else's technology and creating a better selling product with it? Microsoft practically invented the concept.

    4. Re:Microsoft... by aristotle-dude · · Score: 1, Insightful
      "Stealing someone else's technology and creating a better selling product with it? Microsoft practically invented the concept."

      You had it right except the "better" part. There is an old saying. "Good artists copy, great artists steal." MSFT copies Apple and does a shitty job of it like these knock off artists in China. Apple sometimes steals ideas from linux and even MSFT but recreate them in a way that look better than the original. That is the difference between good and great artists.

      --
      Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
    5. Re:Microsoft... by grolschie · · Score: 1
      Stealing someone else's technology and creating a better selling product with it? Microsoft practically invented the concept.

      I guess that depends on what your definition of "better" is.
    6. Re:Microsoft... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >Stealing someone else's technology and creating a better selling product with it? Microsoft practically invented the concept.

      And Linus Torvalds perfected it. Yay, OSS!

      (Yeah, this is a slam but ask yourself who I'm actually slamming)

    7. Re:Microsoft... by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1
      "Stealing someone else's technology and creating a better selling product with it? Microsoft practically invented the concept."
      You had it right except the "better" part.

      "Better" modified "selling", not "product".

    8. Re:Microsoft... by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1

      That's two people now who've misread what I wrote. I guess I should have hyphenated "better-selling". My post, like the headline of this article, is using the word "better" to modify the word "selling". It's quite debatable whether or not Microsoft products are "better" than the product which was "embraced and extended", but 9 times out of 10 the Microsoft product does have more copies sold.

    9. Re:Microsoft... by thealsir · · Score: 0

      That really is funny. Divest yourself from the steve jobs cult for a second.

      Here's a curveball: Why is MS a bigger and more successful company than apple?

      Someone has their shitty and not shitty mixed up.

      --
      Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
    10. Re:Microsoft... by grolschie · · Score: 1

      ah... understood now. :-)

    11. Re:Microsoft... by kimvette · · Score: 1

      That's like saying Campbell's soup is better than that which you get made at a local restaurant.

      More sales != better.

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    12. Re:Microsoft... by thealsir · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Sorry, this just doesn't jive with me. The reason why Microsoft is so widespread is because they cater to the demands of customers. A lot of the features in office are there not because of joe schmoe home user, but because of business demands.

      Lots of things in apple's OS are nonsensical and resource intensive. For all the apple trolls who say that apples are easy to use, well, maybe they are for beginning users, but frustratingly difficult for anyone who wants to perform keyboard navigation or some such. It's just the layout of the OS that makes it less usable.

      As for the "quality" thing, I don't buy that either. Because of the problem of having to work on many different machine configurations instead of one cult-dominated design, Microsoft software will crash more, due to simple probability.

      And please don't use the campbell soup analogy; it could be used on apple too.

      --
      Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
    13. Re:Microsoft... by WilliamSChips · · Score: 1

      But in the case of FOSS the better actually modifies product, not selling like it does with Microsoft.

      --
      Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
    14. Re:Microsoft... by aristotle-dude · · Score: 1
      That really is funny. Divest yourself from the steve jobs cult for a second.

      There is a Steve Jobs cult? Where do I sign up? That sounds so much cooler than the Steve Ballmer cult because all I get is exclusive access to their Warez server on msdn and a crappy plastic card. We also get to watch hilarious Ballmer videos like "Monkeyboy dance" and "Developers, Developers, Developers".

      Here's a curveball: Why is MS a bigger and more successful company than apple?

      MSFT is bigger because they convinced IBM first to use their OS in the IBM PC (PCDOS) and then turned around and supported all of the clone manufacturers with MSDOS. They also played on Steve Jobs naivety to get a hold of a prototype Macintosh long before the official launch under the auspices of developing software for Mac OS. Their real plan was to reverse engineer facets of the UI and windows was the result of that. Don't believe me? Go pick up a copy of "Pirates of the Silicon Valley".

      Someone has their shitty and not shitty mixed up.

      No, I can assure you, I work with the shitty windows and the shitty win32 api every day at work and I have used windows since 3.1 but I chose to get rid of my PCs at home in 2003. I have Vista running via Bootcamp on my MBP and I have to say that it is only a slight improvement over XP in terms of user experience.

      --
      Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
    15. Re:Microsoft... by jcgresham · · Score: 0

      The Mac is not intended for "system admin" work. It's an application platform. IE: Photoshop, Video editing, animation, just looking trendy, etc.

      It's great for what it is; cool and powerful.

    16. Re:Microsoft... by chewedtoothpick · · Score: 1

      Last I checked, Pirates of the Silicon Valley was written and directed by Martyn Burke whose own website says he has only authored FICTION. Not only is he a fiction writer (fiction is the opposite of reality for those of you who are dictionary-deficient) but in every interview done of him, he has expressed a preference for MAC.

      That would be like saying the guy who created and stars in the Mac ads (who has said he has only used macs) is a better expert on Winblows than anyone else on the face of the planet. Then believing him when he said that Winblows has a tune singing "Santa Claus is gunning you down" for it's startup theme right out of the MS box.

      --
      Erutangis ym si siht.
  3. What did Samsung do next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The lead article states, "What Samsung did next is not known." In these cases, the aggrieved company has no legal recourse. Beijing refuses to help. The pirate engineers are rolling in money and hookers.

    Samsung will seek illegal recourse. Samsung is, after all, a Korean company, and all such companies are run by Korean men, of whom the overwhelming majority have served 2 years of mandatory service in the brutal Korean military.

    The illegal recourse is to find and kill the Chinese pirate engineers. The operation should follow the rules of the Korean Special Forces and should leave no trails or traces.

    1. Re:What did Samsung do next? by MadCow42 · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Gentle" pursuasion works... here's what an old dealer of my last company did to ensure companies paid their bills: he had a special cargo container (1 40-foot shipping container you see on ships/trucks) that was essentially filled with cement. If you were late paying, he'd drop it off in front of your business... essentially blocking the most critical access to the building (front door, shipping dock, whatever works).

      Customers pay. Nobody gets hurt, and life goes on.

      Only if we could do that here... (being Belgium, that is)

      MadCow.

      --
      I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
    2. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Samsung won't do anything about it. They're trying to clean up their image (in the past when fined by the government, officials would just vanish and their problem would disappear - nowadays they pay the fine and suck it up, because their international image is more important).

      That, and the fact these pirates are most likely backed by the triads, in turn backed by corrupt Chinese officials. For as much power as Samsung's old family cartel hold in South Korea, I don't think anyone on the planet wants to screw with the Chinese. Only the biggest idiot in the world would try to solve a problem with the triads through violence.

    3. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Informative

      Beijing refuses to help. The pirate engineers are rolling in money and hookers.

      Even Donald Trump agrees that the Chinese gov't is playing dirty:

      http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/10/9/23075 5.shtml?s=icp

      Why we continue to give away jobs to a big communist cheater and run up a big bubble-risky trade deficit with them, I'll never know.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    4. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      all such companies are run by Korean men, of whom the overwhelming majority have served 2 years of mandatory service in the brutal Korean military.

      I've never met a Korean guy I considered brutal. Or even slightly willing to stand up for himself.

      Korean women...now they are brutal.

    5. Re:What did Samsung do next? by zoftie · · Score: 1

      I would second that as if there is no recourse offered, that what usualy east spirals down to. Thats where investment in india is far better then investment in china. See how they are handling Kashmir, it is tough. If it were for chinese. They'd come in, kill everyone who opposes them and jail the half of people to make the point.
      Thats the way the world turns. :)

    6. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 1

      You when lucky that the building did not have a fire at the time you when blocking the door or you company may of been slapped with a BIG FINE and or jall time for the person who made that happen.

    7. Re:What did Samsung do next? by oohshiny · · Score: 1

      Why we continue to give away jobs to a big communist cheater and run up a big bubble-risky trade deficit with them, I'll never know.

      That's a legitimate question, and the answer is pretty simple: because the US standard of living and low inflation rate depend on cheap Chinese imports, as well as a commitment to free trade. Furthermore, China owns significant parts of the US (how do you think the trade deficit is paid for?).

      That's why voters keep voting for parties that promise to keep the current trade policy going. It's really just the same irresponsible behavior the majority of Americans display with their personal credit cards, and sooner or later, it ends in bankruptcy, or at least really hard times.

    8. Re:What did Samsung do next? by udderly · · Score: 1

      Because that's the new global economy. China is the new 800lb gorilla and everybody knows it.

      Whenever anyone in the West starts making a big deal about their human rights abuses, trade policies, rampant piracy or whatever, Beijing trots out that little whiskey-swilling porno addict from North Korea to show us that we need China's cooperation on the world stage. What, you thought that Kim Jong-il was doing this on his own? Please. That clown couldn't find his ass with both hands.

    9. Re:What did Samsung do next? by stunt_penguin · · Score: 1

      "What Samsung did next is not known."

      Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

      With Samsung, it's not that hard to imagine ;)

      --
      When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
    10. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Qzukk · · Score: 1

      You wouldn't have to actually block the door, just blocking the view of the door from the street with something that looked like construction equipment would pretty much end the flow of people coming in.

      --
      If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
    11. Re:What did Samsung do next? by timmarhy · · Score: 1

      they cried into a basket knowing they were powerless to do anything, thats what

      --
      If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
    12. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      That's a legitimate question, and the answer is pretty simple: because the US standard of living and low inflation rate depend on cheap Chinese imports, as well as a commitment to free trade.

      But we are building up a huge trade bubble which risks a big crash, worse than the dot-com crash that put many of us on the streets. We party it up when free trade is good to us, but when the hangover hits, we change our toon.

      That's why voters keep voting for parties that promise to keep the current trade policy going.

      Most voters are ambivalent. It is favors to biz lobbyists, not voter demand that keeps them going.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    13. Re:What did Samsung do next? by identity0 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Ooh! I smell blockbuster!

      Jet Li as a disgruntled Chinese engineer who must help his corrupt evil employer pirate Korean cell phones to feed his family, and Jackie Chan as the bumbling Korean businessman who must bring him to justice! Who will win in this contest of wills! Can Li retain his honor after making pink cell phones for teenage girls! Find out in - Death Factory of Cell Phones: The Legend of The Ringtone Dragon Coming soon!

    14. Re:What did Samsung do next? by timeOday · · Score: 1
      That's a legitimate question, and the answer is pretty simple: because the US standard of living and low inflation rate depend on cheap Chinese imports, as well as a commitment to free trade.
      I only hope this trade defict policy actually manages to sustain our standard of living and low inflation in the medium and long term. I rather suspect that we're simply selling down the gradient between our standard of living and China's. By the time China reaches parity (or even equilibrium), this world may be very different place for Americans than it is now. Yes, I know many aspects of economics are not zero sum. But natural resources (oil) and military dominance are.
    15. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I dunno. The triads were pretty easy in GTA3.

    16. Re:What did Samsung do next? by oohshiny · · Score: 1

      I only hope this trade defict policy actually manages to sustain our standard of living and low inflation in the medium and long term.

      It will not--it's unsustainable. Over this century, there will be an equilibration of living standards across the US, Europe, China, and India. So, the best we can do is help those nations develop quickly and try to engineer a soft landing.

    17. Re:What did Samsung do next? by oohshiny · · Score: 1

      But we are building up a huge trade bubble which risks a big crash, worse than the dot-com crash that put many of us on the streets. We party it up when free trade is good to us, but when the hangover hits, we change our toon.

      Of course. But people prefer partying and demonstrating their military might to paying for education, research, and meaningful infrastructure.

      Most voters are ambivalent. It is favors to biz lobbyists, not voter demand that keeps them going.

      Lobbyists don't vote, voters do. And voters have been clear: they elect politicians that keep cheap oil and cheap imports coming, politicians that cut public funding for research and education, and politicians that start wars. And they have been doing that in both parties.

    18. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Okay, this is slashdot so everything is needs to be questioned.

      You did say a standard 40ft shipping container FULL of concrete.

      Concrete weighs on average, 150 lb/ft3 (2400 kg/m3), the volume of a standard 40ft shipping container is 2390 ft3 (67.7 m3). That container full of concrete would weigh in at 358500 lbs (162613 kg). That weight is not exactly something you can move around and drop off at random places.

    19. Re:What did Samsung do next? by drsquare · · Score: 2, Informative
      The illegal recourse is to find and kill the Chinese pirate engineers. The operation should follow the rules of the Korean Special Forces and should leave no trails or traces.

      Two years military service doesn't teach you to be an assassin who can kill and leave no trace. It teaches you to run around like a bitch and do pressups like a bitch, but not much else.

      There are very few organisations in the world which can kill someone and leave no trace, and Samsung ain't one of them.
    20. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Spirilis · · Score: 1

      "essentially filled with concrete" is open for interpretation--it was filled but he didn't specify if it was filled to the top. You could probably get by with filling it 1/8th the way or less.

      --
      the real at&t mix
    21. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Lobbyists don't vote, voters do. And voters have been clear: they elect politicians that keep cheap oil and cheap imports coming, politicians that cut public funding for research and education, and politicians that start wars. And they have been doing that in both parties.

      I disagree. The granularity is not there to pick and choose at that level. A politician can get away with giving big biz what they want by picking popular social issues such as gay marriage.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    22. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So was your mom.

    23. Re:What did Samsung do next? by oohshiny · · Score: 1

      A politician can get away with giving big biz what they want by picking popular social issues such as gay marriage.

      Well, then that issue is more important to voters than health care, education, fiscal responsibility, peace, or security. So, they are getting what they want.

      Those voters may be stupid, they may regret their choice 10-20 years later, or they may never figure out what hit them (just like many US voters haven't figured out how US policies that voters voted for in the 50's and 60's are largely responsible for Middle Eastern terrorism today), but they are still adults that are responsible for their actions and the consequences.

    24. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Scarletdown · · Score: 1
      (being Belgium, that is)


      No need to swear, man. :D

      --
      This space unintentionally left blank.
    25. Re:What did Samsung do next? by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 1
      (being Belgium, that is)


      No need to swear, man. :D

      No joke, but the French word for Belgium actually translates as "nice testicle".
    26. Re:What did Samsung do next? by MadCow42 · · Score: 1

      I guess I forgot to mention that this was in China. Such safety infractions aren't always taken as seriously where he was doing this.

      MadCow

      --
      I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
    27. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Znork · · Score: 1

      "The granularity is not there to pick and choose at that level."

      I'd suggest you lobby for proportional representation. As long as the US is a predominantly two-party winner-takes-all system, you wont get the finer granularity available in multi-party systems.

      Of course, considering the vested interest of the current parties and the lobbyists for whom it's much more practical to have to buy only two candidates, reforms in the direction of more representative democracy may not be likely to happen.

    28. Re:What did Samsung do next? by LordKronos · · Score: 1

      More importantly, I didn't take it to mean that it was filled with poured concrete (so that 100% of the volume was occupied). Instead, I figured it meant that it was filled with broken up sections of concrete slab (which is a common use for those 40ft dumpsters). Irregularly shaped chunks randomly dropped into the dumpster will leave a lot of airspace in between.

    29. Re:What did Samsung do next? by DJNW · · Score: 1

      Two years military service doesn't teach you to be an assassin who can kill and leave no trace. It teaches you to run around like a bitch and do pressups like a bitch, but not much else

      That's true. But who said they'd use a human? They're an asian tech company, they'll probably just send a Samsung branded assassin-bot...

    30. Re:What did Samsung do next? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      I'd suggest you lobby for proportional representation. As long as the US is a predominantly two-party winner-takes-all system, you wont get the finer granularity available in multi-party systems.

      What is really needed is specific issues put to vote, not just poeple. Many states do this.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  4. This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Joseph+W.+Stalin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The manufacturers of the "genuine" products will need to compete based on price. It seems that being the first isn't a factor in the Chinese market. The only worry is that companies like Samsung could downsize their R&D departments to better compete on price, which would result in fewer innovations for everyone.

    --
    In Soviet Russia, sigs read YOU!
    1. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by NineNine · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Competing in price is never a good business decision. That's business 101. If the only thing you're competing on is price, then you will fail.

      The manufacturers of the "genuine" products will need to compete based on price.

      But if you really believe that, would you find anything wrong with me selling a bulk spammer with the "Red Hat" name on it?

    2. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Joseph+W.+Stalin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm not saying it is good for the business. It is very bad for the business. The customers, however, will enjoy the short term benefit of low prices. The customers will also likely suffer fewer innovations because companies like Samsung don't want to waste money coming up with new features that will just get copied.

      --
      In Soviet Russia, sigs read YOU!
    3. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by datawhore · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Sorry that's wrong on two fronts: 1. 'low cost as strategy' rarely is a good ultimate strategy in business and 2. lack of respect for IP isn't "capitalist".

      I'm sure you already know this, but the reason we have IP (in capitalist countries) is to encourage innovation. The less (good) IP is respected, the less incentive there is to innovate. Of course here on slashdot we know that not all IP encourages innovation, but this is a pretty egregious example of where lack of IP is going to hurt innovation and that's where the problem lies.

      If there's one way that Samsung can respond to this, it's to stop manufacturing in China, and perhaps stop selling there too. Rock and a hard place though.

    4. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by s20451 · · Score: 2, Funny

      No, you don't understand. In the absence of intellectual property protection (as in China), you will see innovation and development flourish, since it will be perfectly legal for other firms to do that thing which is most valuable to innovation: copying. And even though there is no value in doing so, people will continue to innovate for some reason. The engineers should charge for performances or sell T-shirts with their designs on them.

      --
      Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
    5. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Joseph+W.+Stalin · · Score: 1

      I realize that, that is why I put Capitalism in quotes. It isn't the same as the Western world because of lack of respect of intellectual property. It really isn't good for business or customers. The customers will enjoy low prices, but in the long term, they will suffer the lack of innovation due to companies like Samsung downsizing their R&D departments. I guess my post's subject contradicts the actual post.

      --
      In Soviet Russia, sigs read YOU!
    6. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This isn't capitalism, its outright theft. Without copyright laws and patents companies would never spend the millions of dollars they do on researching new products. You're basically saying a movie company should compete with the price of pirated DVD's, even though the pirates never put out the $100 million to produce the movie in the first place.

    7. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Joseph+W.+Stalin · · Score: 1
      No, you don't understand. In the absence of intellectual property protection (as in China), you will see innovation and development flourish, since it will be perfectly legal for other firms to do that thing which is most valuable to innovation: copying. And even though there is no value in doing so, people will continue to innovate for some reason. The engineers should charge for performances or sell T-shirts with their designs on them.
      Could you elaborate on "for some reason?" Why should a company invest in developing something new to differentiate their product if they won't be protected? The competition will just copy it and sell it at a lower price because they didn't have to invest as much in R&D (beyond copying). It doesn't make sense for a company to do this.
      --
      In Soviet Russia, sigs read YOU!
    8. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Joseph+W.+Stalin · · Score: 1

      The subject I chose isn't really correct. I agree with you, this will hurt business and customers too (in the long run). That's why I wrote about the lack of innovation. This is a pure price war without the factors of mercantilism (that is, factors such as being first to innovate don't affect price).

      --
      In Soviet Russia, sigs read YOU!
    9. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by s20451 · · Score: 0

      My post was intended to be a satire of the weak arguments I see on this site opposing IP protection.

      Without value in IP, there is no economic reason to innovate. The only reason left is for the prestige value, while doing something else to pay the bills. This is basically a "hobbyist" mentality, and is antithetical to the notion of professional engineering.

      So I actually agree with you.

      --
      Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
    10. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think he's applying the arguments people use to validate their music filesharing habits to this situation in China.

    11. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Belial6 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Without value in IP, there is no economic reason to innovate"

      While you can debate whether IP is an absolute right, human rights violation, or somewhere in between. Your statement that innovation will not happen without "value in IP" is verifiably false. Just look at the vast majority of human history.

    12. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 3, Insightful
      My post was intended to be a satire of the weak arguments I see on this site opposing IP protection.

      Also known as a strawman argument.

      Without value in IP, there is no economic reason to innovate.

      Sure there is. Without innovation a company has no advantage over its competitors. To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.

    13. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Hank+the+Lion · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The manufacturers of the "genuine" products will need to compete based on price.
      And how do you compete based on price with a company that does not have any R&D costs?
      Downsizing on R&D will not be enough, as their R&D is (practically) zero.
      Ah, I see! You propose that the whole world must stop innovating, because it clearly does not pay!

      I'd say: let the Chinese do within their borders what they like, but sue every bastard that imports these counterfeit goods.

    14. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by hunterx11 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      This isn't capitalism, its outright theft.

      "Outright theft" tends to comprise theft rather than non-theft. Of course, this piracy indirectly deprives others of resources, but then again, so does capitalism.

      So, this is capitalism, and it is indirect theft.

      --
      English is easier said than done.
    15. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually in a truly free market (as in lassaiz faire), there is no such thing as copyrights, patents, etc. "intellectual property" only exists because of government regulations. The Chinese market is far closer in this way to rand-ian style freedom than any other market. The fact that it is pushed primarily by criminals and copy artists looking for nothing else but to make a quick buck should be no surprise to anyone. Libertarianism is the philosophy of the all powerful self.

    16. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
      To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.


      Okay, so I find that my Super Duper Gizmo is duplicated and sold very cheaply by a company that didn't have to expend any money on research and development. I can no longer sell my original Gizmo, because someone has undercut me.

      So I head back to the drawing board. I work with my customers, I do some market research, I find out what everyone wants and/or will want, I hire some top-notch people who know Gizmos, I go and develop Super Duper Gizmo Plus Plus. Mere seconds after my product hits the market, I've found that someone is already producing knockoffs and selling it at dirt cheap prices, prices that I cannot justify because I could never recoup my investment to develop the product.

      Maybe my process is crap. So, I hit the drawing board again, splitting my costs between making Super Duper Gizmo 2007 Extreme, and improving my manufacturing and go-to-market capabilities. But guess what happens? I hit the market with Super Duper Gizmo 2007 Extreme, and seconds later, I find the exact same product, sold under a different name, for chump change, which I of course cannot match because of the money I spent developing my product.

      Maybe I'm in the wrong game. I should just stick to manufacturing. That's the only place where I can actually make any money. Trying to make innovative products has proven to me to be a complete waste of money.

      Now a whole lot of companies have moved to just copy and manufacture, or copy and add the smallest delta to a product where they can justify spending money to make a few pennies more than their competitors. In 2017, the only product anyone makes is Super Duper Gizmo 2017, which is merely the Super Duper Gizmo 2007 Extreme with a new paint job (colors are cheap to do), a different menu ordering (switching strings in the program is cheap to do), and square buttons instead of round buttons (changing the tooling to make square buttons is cheap to do).

      Why innovate? Where is the incentive to innovate? I create a new product, it gets stolen from right under me. I improve my process, but can't add any new features to my product because I've spent it on the process, so now the product is stale, and no one wants it.

      It's a no-win situation.
    17. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by NineNine · · Score: 1

      Sure there is. Without innovation a company has no advantage over its competitors. To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.

      You're conveniently leaving off the important part of the logic in his argument. Sure, innovation is important to compete. That's what makes or breaks most companies. But if a company is going to innovate, only to see their competition copy their products, but without spending one red cent in R&D, than the original company is already in the hole, and that company will either A. no longer innovate in that market or B. get out of that market altogether. Only an idiot would spend time and money to create something, knowing that it'll be copied soon thereafter, thus eliminating any profit motive for the inventor.

    18. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >Your statement that innovation will not happen without "value in IP" is verifiably false

      History is history. China is here and now.

      How trivial it was to demolish your argument.

    19. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by NineNine · · Score: 1

      While you can debate whether IP is an absolute right, human rights violation, or somewhere in between. Your statement that innovation will not happen without "value in IP" is verifiably false. Just look at the vast majority of human history.

      Care to give an example? It certainly doesn't make any sense to me why somebody would spend time and money inventing something, just so that other people can profit off of it.

    20. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1
      Why innovate? Where is the incentive to innovate? I create a new product, it gets stolen from right under me. I improve my process, but can't add any new features to my product because I've spent it on the process, so now the product is stale, and no one wants it.

      Is this the question and the answer? You innovate because when your product becomes stale no one wants it.

    21. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by LordLucless · · Score: 1

      Patents were first used used in the 1400s in Italy. They came to England in the 1600s. Prior to that, all technological development was made without the protection of patents. Unless you care to claim that the human race never developed technologically from its conception until the 1400s, your claim is false.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    22. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1
      You're conveniently leaving off the important part of the logic in his argument.

      I just double-checked, and I don't see any logic in his argument. In fact, I don't really see much of an argument at all.

      Sure, innovation is important to compete. That's what makes or breaks most companies. But if a company is going to innovate, only to see their competition copy their products, but without spending one red cent in R&D, than the original company is already in the hole, and that company will either A. no longer innovate in that market or B. get out of that market altogether.

      So believe that without copyright law there would be no companies in any markets? That doesn't make any sense. Companies have existed longer than copyright law. Companies innovate because without innovation there is no company. Sure, eventually other companies will copy those innovations, but that just means the company has to keep innovating to stay in business. They can't just create a product and collect royalties.

      Now some products are easier to copy than others, of course. And in the absence of copyright law you may very well see R&D spending shift away from the easiest products to copy and toward the harder ones to copy. And you'll likely also see companies paying much more attention to keeping its trade secrets from leaking. But that's a far cry from saying that innovation will stop completely.

    23. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      Sure there is. Without innovation a company has no advantage over its competitors. To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.

      Theres also the third requirement - innovation to move the market forward.

      Whats the market going to look like when the market innovator has no recourse on those undercutting them and they cant afford to lower the prices, eat the R&D costs and fight them on that front? Whats it going to look like when they decide to leave the market? Are you seriously under the impression that the copiers are suddenly going to grow a backbone and magic their own top class R&D department out of thin air? You think the copiers would be able to sustain their own low pricing in that circumstance?

    24. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      Is this the question and the answer? You innovate because when your product becomes stale no one wants it.

      Problem is, that doesnt work - sure, the product is stale, but if you invest money improving it, theres someone out there that can take that improvement and produce it for less than you can because they have no investment to recoup. Now theres two products on the market that arent stale, except one is higher priced than the other, so guess which one consumers are buying...
    25. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by NineNine · · Score: 1

      And in the absence of copyright law you may very well see R&D spending shift away from the easiest products to copy and toward the harder ones to copy.

      That's the whole point of this article. Virtually nothing is hard to copy, any more. Hell, cell phones? That's not a simple device, by any means, but it's being done. I get emails from China on a daily basis offering to manufacture short runs of just about any product I can imagine, and all it takes is an email.

      So believe that without copyright law there would be no companies in any markets?

      No, but there would not be any big new products. No big breakthroughs or advances. Even the companies run by the most dim-witted of CEO's would only have to lose their shirt on R&D once or twice before they learned that it's futile to spend any R&D money.

      Companies have existed longer than copyright law

      Before there was copyright laws, companies were making buggy whips and butter churns. A. Those things didn't take billions of dollars in R&D to invent a new butter churn and B. Global communication wasn't instant.

      But, since you say there's no argument, can you come up with a single example of a company innovating something, and knowing full well that it was going to be pirated? Hell, I can't even imagine of a situation in which that would happen.

    26. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by NineNine · · Score: 2, Insightful

      1400's... let's see... did companies spend billions of dollars in the 1400's developing new butter churns and buggy whips? Did they have instant global communications with which to spread the inventions? Did they have CNC milling machines that could create virtually any simple object that you can imagine, with just a few buttons?

    27. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by wandlero · · Score: 1

      How about Galileo, Newton, and most of the other early scientists? They were working with purely intellectual matters, and most did it for the sake of knowing/learning/moving forward. Profit hasn't always been at the center of innovation. Sure, it has played a part - people do like to get paid - but there is a whole other set of reasons for doing things. Reasons like to help mankind. Pride is another one.
      How about the whole weapons industry - from the stone age onward? Is that purely profit? (ok, today it is). Going from the sticks, to stone weapons, to metals took innovation, which may or may not have been based on profit.

      Today most innovations are technology related it doesn't mean the reasons are purely profit driven.

    28. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Whats the market going to look like when the market innovator has no recourse on those undercutting them and they cant afford to lower the prices, eat the R&D costs and fight them on that front? Whats it going to look like when they decide to leave the market?

      It doesn't seem to me that the market will look any different. What did the video cassette industry look like after Betamax failed? What happened to PCs after IBM left? How is UNIX doing now that Bell Labs isn't involved in it? What would chicken sandwich industry look like without Chick-Fil-A? How would the photocopying industry be doing if Xerox wasn't involved?

      Are you seriously under the impression that the copiers are suddenly going to grow a backbone and magic their own top class R&D department out of thin air?

      Any company which intends to stay in business in the absence of "IP law" needs to spend a portion of their profits on R&D. Otherwise, someone is just going to copy their copy, add a little bit of innovation, and take away all the market share.

      You think the copiers would be able to sustain their own low pricing in that circumstance?

      It seems to me you're imagining a world in which any item can be replicated perfectly and instantaneously without doing any work at all. In such a world perhaps you'd have a point, but we don't live in such a world. Copying someone else's product generally takes time, and during that time the company who first created the product will enjoy limited monopoly power. That's where corporate profits come from, and after that limited monopoly runs out the company either has to continue to innovate or take its profits and leave (to enter a different market, for instance).

    29. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1
      That's the whole point of this article. Virtually nothing is hard to copy, any more. Hell, cell phones? That's not a simple device, by any means, but it's being done. I get emails from China on a daily basis offering to manufacture short runs of just about any product I can imagine, and all it takes is an email.

      Umm, OK, I'll give you a bunch of plastic and silicon, and my cell phone, and you give me a replica of it. You must have a seriously different definition of "hard to copy" than I do.

      But, since you say there's no argument, can you come up with a single example of a company innovating something, and knowing full well that it was going to be pirated? Hell, I can't even imagine of a situation in which that would happen.

      Well, every company in this story knows that their products are going to be pirated. Pretty much everyone who creates anything that *can* be pirated knows that it *will* be pirated. I think you're going to have to rephrase the question.

    30. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1
      Is this the question and the answer? You innovate because when your product becomes stale no one wants it.
      Problem is, that doesnt work - sure, the product is stale, but if you invest money improving it, theres someone out there that can take that improvement and produce it for less than you can because they have no investment to recoup.

      At which point you improve it again! Taking someone else's idea and building a manufacturing plant to produce a similar product takes time. Building a plant to produce a similar product at a cheaper price takes even longer, and doing so when you're trying to hit a moving target takes even longer than that.

    31. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by NineNine · · Score: 1

      Galileo and Newton were pure scientists. When Newton came out with his papers about gravity, nobody said, "Gravity, huh? Wow! I had no idea that if I dropped something, it would fall towards the center of the Earth!".

      You have to understand, that academia, while great with pure sciences, isn't about applying that science to create a new thing.

      Sure, there are going to be anomolies of people creating things out of pure altruism, but those are just outliers. Most human beings want to be compensated in some way for their work.

      Your example of weapons is a good one. Sure, many were invented before IP. But even then, those were FIERCELY guarded secrets. Spies have always been interested in new weapons plans. Weapons is about profit AND not getting killed by your own lethal weapon. In fact, weapons are probably some of the most guarded innovations even in today's culture.

    32. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by LordLucless · · Score: 1

      No, they didn't. Did civilization progress from may take place with patent law. It doesn't even demonstrate that patents increase the rate of innovation, as there could be other explanations for innovation (such as the development of enabling technologies, which, frankly, are far more likely to be the cause for the 20th centuries explosive advancement than the patent system).

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    33. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by kimvette · · Score: 1

      Unless mass production, assembly lines, media duplicators, and automation were all in place in the 1400s and 1600s, your counter-claim is false.

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    34. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by LordLucless · · Score: 1

      No, they didn't. Did civilization progress from < 2000 BC to 1400AD? Yes? Then patents are not necessary for innovation. All your argument proves is that innovation may take place with patent law. It doesn't even demonstrate that patents increase the rate of innovation, as there could be other explanations for innovation (such as the development of enabling technologies, which, frankly, are far more likely to be the cause for the 20th centuries explosive advancement than the patent system).

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    35. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      It certainly doesn't make any sense to me why somebody would spend time and money inventing something, just so that other people can profit off of it.

      Those of us who are employees of businesses we don't own do it every day.

    36. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by LordLucless · · Score: 1

      So unless something is mass production, assembly lines, media duplicators, and automation, it's not an example of technological development? I think you have a rather narrow concept of technology.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    37. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1
      Your statement that innovation will not happen without "value in IP" is verifiably false. Just look at the vast majority of human history.
      Care to give an example?

      Sign language, the alphabet, numbers, the globe, beer, the boomerang, the button, the tie, calculus, the candle, playing cards, chocolate, money, the compass, dentures, the encyclopedia, glass, the wheel, gunpowder, ink, the lock and key, nails, paper, the pocket watch, the saddle, soap, the flush toilet, the vending machine, wine...

    38. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by kimvette · · Score: 1


      *whoosh*

      That was the necessity of granting at least SOME IP protection going over your head.

      When patents were first conceived, none of that was in place and yet they saw the need to grant a limited monopoly to promote the progress of useful arts and sciences, and mass production was simply not possible (for the most part) then.

      Now it is MORE important to provide at least a limited-duration monopoly on innovation, because copycats can ramp up production VERY quickly, MUCH more quickly than the original, with the R&D paid for by the actual designer. With today's technology it is far, FAR easier to rip off the original inventors' ideas, removing the incentive to bother sharing inventions with the world in the first place.

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    39. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by LordLucless · · Score: 1

      And you're changing the subject of the argument. The original poster claimed that technological progress without patents was impossible. I pointed to a period of human history that developed technologically without patents. You claim that with modern technology, its easier to copy innovations, thus removing the incentive for creators. How does that relate at all to the historical fact that civilizations have developed technologically without patents? Patents may make an environment more conducive to innovation, leading to a higher rate of invention, but to claim that innovation without patent protection is impossible is patently (sorry) false.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    40. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1
      Getting a manufacturing plant online takes a lot less time than you might imagine. There are companies that specialise in producing things from CAD drawings; for simple designs they take minutes to hours to get the plant online. If you can't think of something simple that would require a lot of R&D, then consider anything that a fluid flows around (a wing, a turbine, even the paddle on an electric mixer), which typically requires a lot of computational fluid dynamics simulation on expensive hardware, and analysis by expensive people, to get right. Once you've seen one, however, it is trivial to imitate.

      Manufacturing technology keeps improving, and as it does the time between final plans and final product drops a lot.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    41. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      OK, I'll give you a bunch of plastic and silicon, and my cell phone, and you give me a replica of it. You must have a seriously different definition of "hard to copy" than I do.

      Software from the 'phone can be copied off it relatively easily. If it's built from off the shelf components (and most are), it's quite easy to identify the part numbers and put in a bulk order to the same supplier. You can probably go a bit cheaper if you're not worried about IP law (e.g. ARM-compatible chips made by someone who stole a copy of the designs, rather than an ARM-licensee). Even custom ASICs aren't impossible; you can examine them under a high-powered microscope to generate a mask and produce duplicate (this was very common in the early days of ICs). You then start manufacturing.

      You didn't have to pay any of the people who wrote the software (you just took it from the Flash/ROM chips in the original), or the people who did the design. You don't have to eat the cost of low-volume runs of prototypes where the bugs were worked out, so you can dramatically undercut the original manufacturer. For a modern handset, built primarily with off-the-shelf components, I would imagine it would take less than a week for a good team to extract the designs, and perhaps another week to get the factory producing them. If you can get one more than a couple of weeks before the launch (e.g. a press review copy), then you can even be first to market, beating the original inventors.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    42. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1
      Getting a manufacturing plant online takes a lot less time than you might imagine.

      I find it intriguing that you know how much time I imagine it takes to get a manufacturing plant online.

      Manufacturing technology keeps improving, and as it does the time between final plans and final product drops a lot.

      However, if "IP laws" were eliminated then manufacturing technology would cease improving, along with all other innovation, right?

    43. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by WilliamSChips · · Score: 1

      The entirety of mathematics, and most science up to recent times.

      --
      Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
    44. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1
      Software from the 'phone can be copied off it relatively easily.

      Software, of course, is one of the major exceptions. That said, software which is protected by DRM technologies can take quite a while to access. Witness how long it took for the X-Box to be hacked via software.

      For a modern handset, built primarily with off-the-shelf components, I would imagine it would take less than a week for a good team to extract the designs, and perhaps another week to get the factory producing them.

      If that's true it's pretty amazing. Imagine what an incredible world we could have if anyone could start up a cell phone manufacturing company in a week's time. I think I'm moving to China.

    45. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by alais4 · · Score: 1

      I heard somewhere that the japanese animation mimicked cartoons of the US mid-late century before developing into the famous "anime" style. If the goods are copied but also unique, with perhaps different and preferable features, it's better for consumers if products can compete in the open market.

    46. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      "Galileo and Newton were pure scientists."

      Ummm, you need to read a little more about both these people, for starters Newton was head of the royal mint and is responsible for developing the "gold standard" that underpinned the financial world for three centuries.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    47. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Delita · · Score: 1

      Sounds like that would be the time for Free Open Source R&D. Unless of course... openly developed physical goods are in some way different than openly developed software?

      We all know that some day labor and manufacturing costs WILL approach zero. Lets pretend that day was yesterday, and look at examples of success that already exist.

    48. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      It seems to me you're imagining a world in which any item can be replicated perfectly and instantaneously without doing any work at all. In such a world perhaps you'd have a point, but we don't live in such a world.


      This is pretty much the assertion that the article in question is making: that "Chinese manufacturers are copying the circuit boards and designs of products from Japan and Korea, and they're doing it so fast that by the time the originals arrive in the marketplace, they're seen as the fakes!" Maybe not instantaneously right now, but fast enough to put the fakes on the market not long after (and in some cases, before) the originals.
    49. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by cnelzie · · Score: 1

      The way you do that is to innovate in ways that they are simply incapable of duplicating.

          Produce a circuit or chip that is so "complicated" that the knock-off guys simply cannot duplicate it without spending nearly as much if not as much as you spent in producing it in the first place.

      --
      If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
    50. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by megaditto · · Score: 1

      IP protection was strengthened during the last two centuries, which directly correlates to the amount of innovation we have.

      *Zero IP protection: took millenia to discover fire, wheels, bows/arrows, masonry.

      *Increased IP protection: in the last 2-3 centuries we got metalloconcrete construction, steam engine, IC engine, diesel, electricity, AC applications, radio, telephone, light bulbs, vacuum valves, transistors, TV, computers, the Internet, antibiotics, fertilizers, EM, biotech/genetic engineering, etc. etc.

      So is IP protection really that bad, given almost all of our technology derives under strong IP conditions? Correlation does not always imply causation, and yet...

      --
      Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
    51. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      The way you do that is to innovate in ways that they are simply incapable of duplicating.

              Produce a circuit or chip that is so "complicated" that the knock-off guys simply cannot duplicate it without spending nearly as much if not as much as you spent in producing it in the first place.
      The "knock-off guys" are quite often (nearly almost always in the case of high tech) the very same people hired by the corporations to manufacture the authentic goods. Every Chinese factory is going to have some ambitious guys looking to make some cash, meaning not a single manufacturer in China can be trusted not to engage in this ramptant behavior.
    52. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by laffer1 · · Score: 1

      Ever heard of open source? Many people create things so that other people like Redhat, Novell and IBM can profit off it.

      --
      MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
    53. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by AK+Marc · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Getting a manufacturing plant online takes a lot less time than you might imagine.

      I think it takes much much more time than you think. You seem to be presuming that there are companies out there that copy everyone else's products. However, most products fail miserably. They only copy the successful ones. So, define successful. Then, get people to fund the copying of successful. After all that, then the minor time to retool that you claim to be the only time necessary to copy something. The total time from my release of the best product ever (with no patents protecting it) and a serious competitor is at least a year, and probably closer to 2 years at the soonest. For something "new" or something that seems another entry into a crowded market (iPod), I would expect that the wait time would be greater and it might be 3-5 years for someone to make serious copies. If trademarks are enforced (and they are in the US, even if China lets the fakes be made with names that are exact copies too), the 2 year head start will be sufficiently differentiating for the product to be self sustaning in a sea of exact duplicates of a lower price. If you think that I'm incorrect, take a look at things that aren't protected, like PC assembly. Dell, despite having little to do with the actual making of the parts of a computer that do the work and whose parts are mostly available wholesale from the manufacturer, still has a name for itself. It does sell computers for more than many competitors, and sells more of them. Anyone could take Dell's specifications and make their own computer just like it for 10% less, but they won't sell as many of them as Dell.

      So, in the real world, your argument has been recognized, examined, and proven by business practices to be simply wrong. A complete lack of patents and copyright would increase innovation. A complete lack of patents and copyrights would still allow for creators to make a profit. It may be more inconvenient. It may be more risky. But it would still be there. IP hold back innovation and progress. IP no longer promotes it.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    54. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      Pure capitalism has the government staying out of the business of business. Copyrights/patents are the government stepping in and limiting what some companies can do. That isn't pure capitalism. Pure capitalism would have everything stay in Trade Secret status with lots of NDAs. Anything that is ever released publicly (song, manufacturing process, etc.) would instantly belong to everyone and could be exploited by everyone. American Capitalism != Capitalism. Just because we have IP laws doesn't mean they are somehow capitalistic.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    55. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >*Zero IP protection: took millenia to discover fire, wheels, bows/arrows, masonry.

      That's THE most stupid /. comment I've ever read!

      Do you really believe that some caveman had invented fire, wheels, etc, and decided not to use them because he couldn't pattent them? That's so ridiculous, that's beyond words! =8-/

      Maybe you should consider that knowledge is interelated, and so the more you have, the more relations open for investigation.

    56. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by FateStayNight · · Score: 1

      mod parent up! Not only is it true but this is slashdot. come on!

    57. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Weedlekin · · Score: 1

      "When patents were first conceived, none of that was in place and yet they saw the need to grant a limited monopoly to promote the progress of useful arts and sciences"

      Patents were first conceived as a form of royal favour (clue: the US did not invent the concept) to eliminate any possibility of competition. The fact that the US constitution happens to make a different excuse for having them does not mean that said excuse is a valid one; I know Americans tend to attribute their "founding fathers" with having the same level of insight that Muslims attribute to Allah, but for everyone else, there is a big difference between somebody saying patents promote the progress of the useful arts and sciences, and this actually being the case.

      "mass production was simply not possible (for the most part) then."

      Mass production has existed since the Neanderthals, who used production lines to make stone tools and weapons. It became pretty common in the bronze age as a way of making large numbers of amphorae, weapons and armour to equip armies, ships, and building materials (everything from mud bricks to quarried stone items of sometimes immense size and weight), and the Romans used it to produce glass, ceramics, nails and screws, wire, chain mail, cart / wagon wheels, and a host of other consumer and military items. Various mediaeval societies mass-produced a wide variety of weapons, cloth, glass, and ceramics (not all were produced by the same societies in any particular time frame); British naval shipyards mass-produced masts and sails from the late 17th century onwards; etc., etc., etc. The flying shuttle, an important concept for full industrial production of complex weaves was _patented_ in England in 1733, more than 50 years before the American Constitution was originally drafted, and is held by many to be one of the keystones of the Industrial Revolution.

      --
      I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
    58. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Thomas+Miconi · · Score: 1

      To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.

      Interestingly, you failed to mention an obvious third way to make a profit: produce the exact same thing, without any of the associated costs which make innovation possible.

      I think you want to look up "parasitism" in a dictionary.

    59. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by psiclops · · Score: 1

      "Without value in IP, there is no economic reason to innovate." except maybe the fact that the first of anything out on the market is usually the most successful. "The only reason left is for the prestige value, while doing something else to pay the bills. This is basically a "hobbyist" mentality, and is antithetical to the notion of professional engineering." most of the finest feats in engineering come more out of pride/passion for a subject than profit. this is specially true in automobiles.

      --
      i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
    60. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Ginger+Unicorn · · Score: 1

      Are you sure it is so black and white? Perhaps sometimes IP holds innovation back, and sometimes enables it. Perhaps that's why the issue is so contested, With one side saying IP is pure evil the other saying IP infringement is pure evil, and neither side ever contemplating that maybe the reason the argument is never concluded is because neither view applies 100% of the time.

      --
      (1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
    61. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by cnelzie · · Score: 1

      That's why you produce your key piece of hardware, such as the core processor, inside a factory that you completely control, in a nation that has strong Intellectual Property protection laws in place. If the key component only comes out of your facility, the knock-off guys will either have to reverse engineer and develop their own copy of the chip, steal the chip or find a way to legally purchase the chip off of you.

          It's possible to work it so that each chip is paid for when it leaves your factory and enters China, then it is up to the facility that is putting together the final product to maintain their own inventory control and stop thievery.

          This solution is mildly complicated, but if one is really concerned about knock-offs and IP, this is the only real way to go about leveraging the lower cost manufacturing available in China, while maintaining control of your technology. Treat China like the "bitch" it deserves to be treated like. Don't produce any high-tech components that are key to your device in China and make the Chinese worker into little more than the menial labor that plugs Socket A and Socket B together.

      --
      If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
    62. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by zippthorne · · Score: 1

      So let's look at that history:

      pre IP:
      10,000 years of banging rocks at things, sometimes attached to sticks with animal parts.

      followed by 5,000 years of "heating this lump that fell from the sky and banging on it with a rock" while "heating" got progressively hotter and "rocks" got progressively harder, larger

      followed by about 200 years in which we've gone from "sharp and well balanced" being the ultimate in technology to "machines that do the yearly labor of 100 men in a day," buttons that when pushed destroy everything, farming techniques that are not only sustainable, but provide us with so much food that the greatest cause of death is no longer, "hunger and/or malnutrition," but "heart disease"

      That 200 years also happened to coincide with the development of IP.

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
    63. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by s20451 · · Score: 1

      most of the finest feats in engineering come more out of pride/passion for a subject than profit. this is specially true in automobiles.

      Right, because there's no tech company in the world that actually innovates. Only people who are not in it for a profit. In their spare time.

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      Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
    64. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by s20451 · · Score: 1

      A complete lack of patents and copyright would increase innovation.

      Yes, because China is the real hotbed of innovation in the world today, not the USA. Is that what you think?

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    65. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by psiclops · · Score: 1

      Right, that's exactly what i said.

      --
      i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
    66. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      Yes, because China is the real hotbed of innovation in the world today, not the USA. Is that what you think?

      Certainly not. Do you think that a poor implementation of inconsistent patents is the same as none at all?

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    67. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      Are you sure it is so black and white? Perhaps sometimes IP holds innovation back, and sometimes enables it.

      I know that it is not black and white. Some areas will be held back more than they are now, others will see more progress. Based on history and the current uses of patents, I believe that the net effect will be an encouragement of innovation. This is not to say that there will be an increase in innovation in every field.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    68. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by s20451 · · Score: 1

      So, according to you:

      Strong IP protection = some innovation (USA)
      Weak IP protection = less innovation (China)
      No IP protection = most innovation

      I'm wondering why you think there's that bump in the middle. If you're right, shouldn't weaker IP protection lead to more innovation?

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      Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
    69. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by superflippy · · Score: 1

      Before there was copyright laws, companies were making buggy whips and butter churns. A. Those things didn't take billions of dollars in R&D to invent a new butter churn and B. Global communication wasn't instant.

      And people who did innovate still tried to hide their inventions to keep rivals from stealing them. For example, they wrote their discoveries in code like the engineers described in Brunelleschi's Dome . Being able to file a patent for your invention beats writing it down in a secret glyph with invisible ink and stashing it in a hidden safe, and it also makes the documentation for future generations much simpler.

      --
      Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
    70. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      I'm wondering why you think there's that bump in the middle. If you're right, shouldn't weaker IP protection lead to more innovation?

      No. It isn't about IP protection in a location, but world-wide. If you are a company planning on innovating, would you go to a location with weak or strong IP protection to make your innovations? You would go to places with strong IP protections. If you are in China and innovate (they do some), but your innovations are based on stolen ideas from other countries, can you then easily sell the infrinced IP back to the strong IP country? I would presume not. Thus, is isn't about taking a system of countries and making direct comparisons to determine which is the best system through extrapolation. The countries compare to each other because of their differences. If the differences were not there (world-wide abolition of IP) then the differential system would cease to exist.

      Try instead to look at when the laws were essentially uniform. Did Socrates or Newton say "screw this, I'm not getting paid royalties for my discoveries so the world car screw itself?" Would the Renaissance have been bigger and better if there were 10,000,000 lawyers running around from the RIAA (Renaissance Industry Artist Association, I presume) charging $10 per head to walk into the Cistine Chapel, sending $0.02 per viewing back to Michaelangelo of course? I submit that if you look at now and other times in history when IP was not protected at all or to a much smaller extent, that the level of innovation correlates to many factors that are not related to IP protection, and that IP protection was not what spurred innovation, but was a factor after it had already occured.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    71. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by megaditto · · Score: 1

      why not? i bet you it is possible many a caveman gave up on innovation after considering their options: either try rubbing sticks/grass/stones/ice/hair/meat together in the hope that it would produce something useful (which will be immediately stolen) or go out and hunt the elephant to put bread on their children.

      The real innovation did not start until shamans (read, IP protection) emerged.

      --
      Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
    72. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by BLKMGK · · Score: 1

      Actually that's being done now. There aren't counterfeit Core2Duo processors because China does NOT have a FAB process capable of making them. Duplicating the design perhaps or they would simply steal it but they do not (yet) have the process. However many chips do not require nearly that comlpicated a process and making it that complicated just for complication's sake isn't cost effective or smart. There are reasons why companies like Intel and AMD won't build their best FABs in China - they know damned well it would all be stolen.

      There's certainly some truth in what you're saying but it's not the solution and certainly won't hold long term.

      --
      Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
    73. Re:This is "Capitalism" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Moron.

  5. Who would thought... by Xymor · · Score: 0

    Looks like 640mb of ram is enough for most people.

    1. Re:Who would thought... by LaughingCoder · · Score: 4, Funny
      ... 640mb ...
      Believe it or not (I know it's hard to fathom in these days when 2GB of RAM can be found in laptops), the quote was 640KB as in kilobytes.
      --
      The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
    2. Re:Who would thought... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Err, you're saying the claim wasn't 640 millibits but 640 kelvinbytes?

    3. Re:Who would thought... by Xymor · · Score: 1

      So you can tell this quote is fake?

    4. Re:Who would thought... by b00fhead · · Score: 1

      Fair enough. That should be enough for anyone!

  6. Don't manufacturer in China by linxdev · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is a downside to manufacturing in China. Even legitimate factories will order parts from a BOM and make illegit items after they fill your order. this is the risk in sending your IP to China to be made on the cheap.

    1. Re:Don't manufacturer in China by British · · Score: 1

      I am reminded of the SNL skit with Tom Hanks called "Sabra Price is Right" where Tom's this sleazy game show host. He "sells" knockoff electronics and keeps saying "it's got Sony guts!"

      Then you realize a lot of the digital camera brands have the same Sanyo(or is it Samsung) guts in them. :)

    2. Re:Don't manufacturer in China by bensch128 · · Score: 1

      I don't understand how anyone would want to outsource all of their manufactoring to China instead of keeping it in-country.

      It seems 100% inevenuable that if the product takes off and becomes popular, then it will be ripped off by people on the manufactoring floor and stolen. I guess this balances out the costs of outsourcing even more.

      I don't feel a drop of pity for Samsung even while I enjoy using a cheap ripoff copy of thier top-of-the-line DVD player. (Or Nike, or GAP, etc.) hehe

      Ben

    3. Re:Don't manufacturer in China by BLKMGK · · Score: 1

      You speak the truth! The aftermarket car part industry is a perfect example. I am aware of several folks who invented\designed innovative parts and when they couldn't find production facilities in the US for a reasonable cost they went overseas. Terrific, the part was produced! Bad, knockoffs showed up on EBAY REAL fast. Seems that if you figure out which Chinese company is producing the parts and offer them the right sum they will gladly produce the parts for you - using the other guy's plans! :-O HKS, Greddy, and other Japanese manufacturers have been burned by this many times. EBAY will often yank these sales when pointed out but WEB sites will happily sell these parts. As a consumer being given the choice between an intake that's $1500 and one that's $700 it really is hard to resist the knockoffs though.

      Don't get too excited though. I have an intake manifold that was supposed to be an OEM Ford part (Cobra upper intake). Only I got mine dirt cheap. Why? Because the guy I bought it from got Alcoa to make a few extra and slip them out the back door to him instead of Ford. At the time, and possibly even now, Alcoa was an American company and the parts were being cast here. The difference is one of scale, the Chinese have turned this into their economy and I don't see them stopping anytime soon.

      --
      Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
  7. This is just an assumption... by y5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... but if the knockoff alternatives lack the DRM that the authentic products contain, I'd probably consider purchasing the knockoff as well.

  8. Why China? by jo7hs2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You know, the fact that China has managed to become the manufacturing center it has is rather astounding. They turn around and steal the technology of the companies who have decided to put plants there. Their system of law is simply unpredictable. By and large, companies who moved there should have known better. As irritated as outsourcing to India has been, in retrospect, we should have made a more concentrated effort in making India, rather than China, the mass-manufacturing center for the American market. India has a few things going for it that China probably never will. First and foremost, they have a republican (small r) system of government. They have benefitted from hundreds of years of English Common Law, which is arguably what makes Biz so seamless and efficient (relatively speaking) in the UK, US, and Canada. Finally, they don't seem to have an appetite for superpower status. We picked the wrong country to invest in. If I owned a manufacturing company, I'd get the heck out of China.

    1. Re:Why China? by UbuntuDupe · · Score: 1

      But India typically refuses to recognize intellectual property just the same.

      --
      Apology to Ubuntu forum.
    2. Re:Why China? by antifoidulus · · Score: 1

      Because the Chinese know how to effectively dangle carrots. They keep paying lipservice to going after knockoffs, but at the same time in order to actually keep foreign companies in China they offer cheap labor and constant promises of how much Chinese consumers(all 1.3 billion of them) will love their products after they establish a presence in the country.

      Meanwhile, the government does whatever they think will best benefit the Chinese nation as a whole. If that means pirating products, so be it. They know Samsung won't pull out of China. It extends to other areas as well. Why do you think proctors of standard exams(such as the GRE) usually turn a blind eye to rampant cheating? Simple, because the government wants to send as many students abroad(often at the expense of foreign governments) as they can to bring back as much knowledge as possible. They don't care if it's unfair to others because those "others" are actually the competition.

      --
      Monstar L
    3. Re:Why China? by jo7hs2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, but at least in India you might have a small chance of at least attempting a lawsuit over it.

    4. Re:Why China? by datawhore · · Score: 1

      While they have English Common Law, business isn't particularly efficient in India. Entrepreneurship is much more difficult than in China due to the government's bureaucracy. Correct me if i'm wrong but you can't just decide to set up shop and then go and do it in the way the Chinese can, despite their pseudo-communist system (in reality China is fairly free market, and hasn't been communist in the traditional sense for quite some time)

    5. Re:Why China? by giorgosts · · Score: 1

      In India corruption is standard business practice, which is a major drawback.

    6. Re:Why China? by king-manic · · Score: 1

      You know, the fact that China has managed to become the manufacturing center it has is rather astounding. They turn around and steal the technology of the companies who have decided to put plants there. Their system of law is simply unpredictable. By and large, companies who moved there should have known better. As irritated as outsourcing to India has been, in retrospect, we should have made a more concentrated effort in making India, rather than China, the mass-manufacturing center for the American market. India has a few things going for it that China probably never will. First and foremost, they have a republican (small r) system of government. They have benefitted from hundreds of years of English Common Law, which is arguably what makes Biz so seamless and efficient (relatively speaking) in the UK, US, and Canada. Finally, they don't seem to have an appetite for superpower status. We picked the wrong country to invest in. If I owned a manufacturing company, I'd get the heck out of China.

      this is not the first time this has happened. See America shortly after the war of independence.

      --
      "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
    7. Re:Why China? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To add another anecdotal data point, when I began graduate school in physics, the few American students were initially intimidated by the larger group of Asian (predominantly Chinese) students because of reputation and standardized test scores. It didn't take long to figure out that they were collectively just a bunch of cheaters who had trouble innovating or being creative. I kept odd hours as a student and twice entered our office in the middle of the night to find some of them going through others' desks and copying homeworks. Three failed classes for being caught cheating on exams and were asked to leave the program. One failed the qualifying exam for cheating as well. Among those that passed the qualifier and went into the research phase for their dissertation, another 5 failed finish their PhD. And these were supposed to be some of their very best.

      All in all, 7 of 16 Asian student finished their PhD, compared to 7 of 8 Americans and the 8th (my wife) will be returning to finish after taking some time off after the birth of our baby.

    8. Re:Why China? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You mean like America did with countless British inventions and discoveries?

      Pot, meet the kettle.

      Dont like the shoe on the other foot? Tough, if you dont like it, set a better example.

    9. Re:Why China? by zoftie · · Score: 1

      As in rest of the world, what is india offers if foundation on which you can build, education and law that is derived from english systems, as some pointed out above. Once you get into the jig, its just one more of those things you hire smart people to deal with. Local people. It is something to be dealt with in the future of course to make shift from third world to second / first world country.\
      2c

    10. Re:Why China? by homer_s · · Score: 1

      Finally, they don't seem to have an appetite for superpower status

      Every country aspires to be a superpower - if not to bully others around, atleast to prevent being bullied by superpowers.
      Do you think everyone is happy being screwed by the USA?

    11. Re:Why China? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      have you seen the way chinese operate? do you think you know the meaning of "efficiency?" don't get me wrong, i know the lower standard of chinese goods and all that, but when you are a business men, and able to do the math after all the expected returns, and the support cost, you see the money, right in front of you, no joke.

    12. Re:Why China? by opkool · · Score: 1

      All your post makes tons of sense. Well, almost all. This paart is not real:

      [India] don't seem to have an appetite for superpower status

      Actualy they have.

      Those who want to be superpowers have aircraft carriers. India has some and is building more. Se:

      India as a superpower:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_as_an_emerging_ superpower

      Indian Navy carriers:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_carrier#Indi an_Navy

      List of Indian carriers:
      http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/carriers/india.htm

      India begins construction of aircraft carrier
      http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-04/1 2/content_433517.htm

      "Moscow and New Delhi today signed a $1.6 billion deal finalizing India's purchase of a refurbished Russian aircraft carrier, fighter jets, and helicopters. Observers say it's a sweet agreement for both sides, allowing Russia to bolster its sagging arms industry and India its regional strategic capacity. "
      http://www.defense-aerospace.com/cgi-bin/client/mo dele.pl?prod=32130&session=dae.23771315.1164583691 .RWojC8Oa9dUAAHETeZY&modele=jdc_1

      Grand Delusions: The Psychology of Aircraft Carriers
      http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/1068/

      India's Military, from CIA's factbook:
      https://cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/in. html#Military

      Peace!

    13. Re:Why China? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Finally, they don't seem to have an appetite for superpower status. We picked the wrong country to invest in. If I owned a manufacturing company, I'd get the heck out of China."

      Supply and demand my friend, China is pumping out plenty of cheap labour at rock bottom prices. In the name of profit you take calculated risks.

    14. Re:Why China? by narsiman · · Score: 1

      I am quite sure you havent tried doing any business with China. Try it once and do the same with India. The China price factor is something you can never compete with. But looking at the long term - In the long term - we are all dead.

  9. ... the lessons of history by SimonInOz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Various econimies, as they have started up, have begun by copying other countries products.

    Hong Kong, Japan, and now - China.

    Oh, and one mustn't forget - USA.

    Some time ago, as the USA economy was just beginning, the USA did not respect copyright laws in any way. Notably, they copied books. There were loud complaints from - I believe - Charles Dickens, among others.

    As their economies move along, their copies became better, then, eventually, they would start to create inovations of their own.

    Then they would start to want copyright laws. And perhaps obey them.

    --
    "Cats like plain crisps"
    1. Re:... the lessons of history by TubeSteak · · Score: 1

      FTFA: Eventually China will crack down on the blatant piracy seen on its shores, but until then, the world will keep on seeing ever more creative and ever better quality copies from Chinese manufacturers, along with complete duds that should definitely be avoided and products of varying quality everywhere in between.

      I don't see why you and the author are making the assumption that China will eventually change its ways. The lack of effective copyright enforcement in China has created a different, yet fully functional, market dynamic.

      China's economy has inneficiencies, but it works, which is about the best argument you can make for any economic or political system. As a matter of fact, China's economic system is working so well, that the Chinese Government can afford to buy billions of dollars in U.S. Bonds/dollars (which means China has ~$1 Trillion in U.S. currency).

      P.S. A high-tech 21st Century China, is in no way comparable to 19th Century America. Maybe you could expand a bit on Hong Kong & Japan, since those examples might be a bit more relevant.

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
    2. Re:... the lessons of history by merphant · · Score: 1

      Isn't this also how the free software movement started out?

    3. Re:... the lessons of history by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 1
      Maybe you could expand a bit on Hong Kong & Japan, since those examples might be a bit more relevant.

      When I was a kid "Made in Japan" meant it was something cheap and crappy. For a while some Japanese products would be labeled "Made in Usa," which apparently is a Japanese city. Just an anecdote, I know.

    4. Re:... the lessons of history by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 1

      Not only the USA, but also Switzerland and the Netherlands. It's quite common, though infuriating for the people who have to watch.

    5. Re:... the lessons of history by Breakfast+Pants · · Score: 1

      I think you're thinking of this guy.

      --

      --

      WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
    6. Re:... the lessons of history by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Usa" is an urban legend.

      http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/usa.asp

    7. Re:... the lessons of history by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 1

      Oddly enough I can distinctly remember when I heard about it. I had some cheap plastic thing that said made in usa and somebody "explained" the usa thing to me. This would have been sometime in the late '60s. Strange what trivial things stick in our brains. Obviously it made quite an impression on me.

    8. Re:... the lessons of history by WilliamSChips · · Score: 1
      P.S. A high-tech 21st Century China, is in no way comparable to 19th Century America
      Hollywood only exists because moviemakers wanted to pirate Edison's moviemaking technology, and they only way they could do that is by getting as far away from New York as possible, and that meant Hollywood.
      --
      Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
    9. Re:... the lessons of history by pH7.0 · · Score: 1

      Pepsi copy Coca Cola.
      Microsoft copy Apple.
      Linux copy UNIX.

      Pepsi is worth $100B, Microsoft is $300B. Linux's world domaintion is going very well.

      pH7

  10. This is "Wal-mart" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "The manufacturers of the "genuine" products will need to compete based on price."

    Don't worry Wal-Mart will see that that happens. Now if you excuse me, I have to place a support call to India.

  11. So does this mean that we can consider China as a by 3seas · · Score: 1

    Duplication plant?

    I mean if they can duplicate it then they should be able to take a prototype and put it into mass production for cost less then anywhere else.
    And since China is supposed to be a socialistic society then that means their society gets a big discount.

    right?

    Its the industrial age in china and lets fact it, they have more people then when we went thru that age.

  12. Dupe! by n1hilist · · Score: 5, Funny

    This post is a dupe! I read this on www.slashdot.cn last week!

    1. Re:Dupe! by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      This post is a dupe! I read this on www.slashdot.cn last week!

      It's not a dupe, itsa knockoff.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:Dupe! by dangitman · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but this is better than the original.

      --
      ... and then they built the supercollider.
    3. Re:Dupe! by jesdynf · · Score: 1

      And Sonk had a more complete header on it, with links to the Coral cache.

      --
      Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
  13. This will become monthly news?... by FaustIN · · Score: 1
    Last month on the same subject: "Counterfeit Cisco Gear Showing Up In US"

    http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/24/181 9200&from=rss

    Anyway I don't see either articles as news... Vaporware it's already an established business!

  14. This is just an assumption...counterfit parts. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Would you fly on a plane that was built with these knockoffs? It's easy to take the shortsighted position that if it's good for me then it must be good in general. But not always.

    1. Re:This is just an assumption...counterfit parts. by GigsVT · · Score: 1

      There's a difference between counterfeit and a knockoff.

      Counterfeit is fraudulently representing itself as something it is not. For example the problem with power output transistors, with fake branding and fraudulent power ratings (they stuck a tiny silicon die into what was supposed to be a much larger transistor).

      That's different from buying a knockoff and knowing it's a knockoff.

      The former is done by organized crime often, the latter is just done by manufacturers not bound by the noose of IP around their neck.

      --
      I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
    2. Re:This is just an assumption...counterfit parts. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      You do fly on planes with knock-off parts

    3. Re:This is just an assumption...counterfit parts. by BLKMGK · · Score: 1

      Counterfeit bolts are actually a HUGE problem! I've read test results on so-called certified bolts and the knock-offs are REALLY REALLY bad! The heat treating and thread cutting are improper in ways that only an engineer would understand but that you and I would certainly understand when an engine falls off of a wing and through the roof of your home! I cannot recall the statistic but at the time I first became aware of this a very significant number of bolts were found to be bogus and in industry that's not cool. When trains, planes, and automobiles start coming apart because the specified tolerances and strength weren't met we'll all pay the price for having substandard materials. Wonder how many of those things are holding bridges together, ships, and who knows what else....

      --
      Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
  15. Self-Interest in China... by BoRegardless · · Score: 3, Informative

    RULES.

    China is growing products & services as their engineering graduates do more and more original work, instead of copying.

    At some point China will need to enforce copyrights, trademarks and patents so that their local inventive products can be sold on the world market...without copycats in the U.S., EU and elsewhere.

    Relevant facts to date:

    Right now Assignee companies of U.S. issued patents in China total 2400 or so, which isn't very many, but it is growing.

    Almost 7000 U.S. patents have been issued to people residing in China. One can assume far more patents are submitted in China but never have foreign applications.

    China graduates more engineers, mathemeticians and scientists every year than the U.S.

    Will it go smoothly, soon, or be diligent in giving foreign patent holders the same rights as Chinese patent holders? I doubt it.

    1. Re:Self-Interest in China... by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      China graduates more engineers, mathemeticians and scientists every year than the U.S.

      That is because their population is 3 times bigger.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:Self-Interest in China... by phantomcircuit · · Score: 1
      China graduates more engineers, mathematicians and scientists every year than the U.S.


      Their population is 4 times that of the US and anyways who wants to be an engineer if you can be an 'artist' and still live pretty well.

      Will it go smoothly, soon, or be diligent in giving foreign patent holders the same rights as Chinese patent holders? I doubt it.


      Foreigners will never have meaningful rights in China.

      The reality of the situation however is that the trade imbalance is offset by government bonds sold to asian countries.

      Are we ever going to pay them back?
  16. Piracy? by caseih · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I find it interesting that this article used the word "Piracy" in conjunction with all these products. In many cases it appears the products weren't pirate versions of the originals, but unique, new products in their own right that happened to have the same features or in some cases even more features. For example the phone that is claimed to be a knock-off of the LG phone looked very similar, but it was by no means identical. The device that looks like a PSP but has a nintendo emulator and GSM phone built in is quite brilliant, and is in no way a fake PSP anymore than a portable tape or cd player is a fake walkman. To me the product would be pirate if it was produced by the same company off the same assembly lines but shipped out the back door and sold as using the original name, brand, etc, but through grey-market channels. On a general level, IP theft in China by chinese companies doing business with foreign companies is rampant. The question is, though, is that a bad thing? Is this not, at some level, unchecked and enthusiastic entrepreneurialism at work? At some point this is bad, as the Chinese, like the Japanese were during the 70s and 80s, are not really inventing or creating anything new. But the Japanese did move on and now seem to be inventing and creating a lot of things, and I think the Chinese will too. But the question becomes what will become of the West?

    1. Re:Piracy? by GigsVT · · Score: 1

      Indeed. In fact most of these new features are driven by semiconductor availability for a certain feature. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to wrap a device around "do it all" semiconductors like the ones that are out now.

      It would be like Intel whining that other people are making motherboards faster than they can. It's all in the chips.

      --
      I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
    2. Re:Piracy? by Loie · · Score: 1

      come on now, it's still piracy. if i'm given the specs to make a car, and then throw in a TV tuner and a nintendo emulator, and change the shape a little bit...it's still the same car. I still used someone else's designs as a shortcut.

    3. Re:Piracy? by caseih · · Score: 1

      I disagree. Microsoft often takes similar specs, then uses their know-how to make a product that does similar things as a competitors. Is Microsoft pirating Apple's iPod? I don't think so. MS didn't create anything new IP-wise. Instead then just took a bunch of existing ideas and technologies and combined them in a novel (debatable) way.

      Making a car that looks similar to an American car, and even has the same features (anti-lock brakes, etc) is hardly piracy. On the contrary, we'd call that capitalism. However if there are patents involved on, say, a special system for coordinating the steering and breaks, and the Chinese company had access to the technologies under contract with the US company but uses that information in its own products, then you might have a point. But I have a hard time seeing how things like cell phones or portable game players are going to qualify as pirate. It's a fine line, I agree. But crying piracy generally is pretty hypocritical by western companies.

    4. Re:Piracy? by Loie · · Score: 1

      i think your brakes analogy is exactly what's happening in chinese factories these days. i'm saying that there is a difference between MS taking existing ideas that worked (ipod) and doing their own thing (zune) versus if MS owned the factories in which ipods were made, took (stole) the specs, changed the case, hacked on an FM tuner, then called it the zune.

  17. India is no better than China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    The Indians (1) aggressively develop nuclear weapons, (2) refuse to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), and (3) shove their surplus labor onto the USA. New Delhi demanded that, in exchange for not interfering with American attempts to promote democracy and human rights, Washington agree to violate the terms of the NPT (of the USA is a signatory), to give outright nuclear technology, and to increase the number of Indian H-1B workers admitted to the USA. Washington agreed.

    At least, the Chinese do not shove their surplus labor onto the USA.

    Moreover, in India, child prostitution is all the rage these days. Sodomizing and raping children is a national hobby in India.

    The Chinese are not angels, but the Indians are no better than the Chinese.

    1. Re:India is no better than China. by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Moreover, in India, child prostitution is all the rage these days. Sodomizing and raping children is a national hobby in India.

      It is with Americans also: they just go to Tailand to do it.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:India is no better than China. by pkphilip · · Score: 2, Insightful

      In India, we also make up stories like you do. But we call them fiction.

    3. Re:India is no better than China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      smoking what, dooood?

  18. What goes around.... by kmahan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Now that China is starting to develop IP of their own it will be interesting to see how they react when other countries pirate it. I doubt they'll say "it's ok."

    --
    Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
  19. Deja vu? by Mongoose · · Score: 1

    Damn...

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=208390&cid=169 92066

  20. This is "selfishness" at its best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Pfft. NO! Copying isn't innovation. Using the base idea with original implimentations added on is innovation.

    "And even though there is no value in doing so, people will continue to innovate for some reason"

    And here you try to handwave human behaviour into existance. There's no "some reason". There has to be good reason and you didn't provide it. In fact you did worse than that. You failed to explain how any innovation will get released to the public in a usable form.

    "The engineers should charge for performances or sell T-shirts with their designs on them."

    For a forum that's titled "your rights online", you all sure don't have a problem dictating to others what they should do.

  21. China discovers generics... by deevnil · · Score: 2, Funny

    Hey this fake cola tastes just like cola! Almost as if it came of the same assembly line....

  22. India vs. China by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The Indians (1) aggressively develop nuclear weapons, (2) refuse to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), and (3) shove their surplus labor onto the USA. New Delhi demanded that, in exchange for not interfering with American attempts to promote democracy and human rights, Washington agree to violate the terms of the NPT (of which the USA is a signatory), to outright give nuclear technology to India, and to increase the number of Indian H-1B workers admitted to the USA. Washington agreed.

    At least, the Chinese do not shove their surplus labor onto the USA.

    Moreover, in India, child prostitution is all the rage these days. Sodomizing and raping children is a national hobby in India.

    The Chinese are not angels, but the Indians are no better than the Chinese.

  23. Woosh ... maybe? by Kadin2048 · · Score: 1

    I think he was joking.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  24. Sentence structure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Sell these products do

    Yoda, is that you?

    1. Re:Sentence structure by udderly · · Score: 1

      Duh...it's a poem:

      Sell these products do
      especially in Asia where the prices are low
      few questions are asked and in many cases,
      the quality is actually pretty good.

      It's profound, don't you think?

  25. editing skills by Main+Gauche · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Sell these products do, especially in Asia where the prices are low, few questions are asked and in many cases, the quality is actually pretty good."

    I'll never complain about Slashdot editors again.

    1. Re:editing skills by ultracool · · Score: 1

      I though they just had a Yoda thing going.

    2. Re:editing skills by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "mmmmm sell these products do mmmmmmm" - Yoda.

    3. Re:editing skills by Sentry21 · · Score: 1

      The worst part is that this is actually valid grammar and sounds fine when said properly, it's just quite awkward in print (and arguably is missing a comma after 'asked' depending on whose style guidelines you're following).

  26. To compete on price you need R&D by mangu · · Score: 5, Insightful
    companies like Samsung could downsize their R&D departments to better compete on price


    I fail to follow your reasoning here. I remember when I paid $240 for an 80mB disk. Today I can get 500gB for $240. How could anyone get a 6000-fold reduction in price without R&D? Any cost-cutting the bean counters do is irrelevant compared to what R&D will get.


    If a technology company wants to prevail in the marketplace, what they need to do is to keep R&D so intense that the copycats will not be able do duplicate the performance of genuine products.

    1. Re:To compete on price you need R&D by Joseph+W.+Stalin · · Score: 1

      Yes, that is why I said they wouldn't completely eliminate R&D. They would still innovate, but it would be focused on lowering the price. However, I can't see a company being willing to add features to their product when the competition is just going to copy it because there is no protection of IP.

      --
      In Soviet Russia, sigs read YOU!
    2. Re:To compete on price you need R&D by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      can't see a company being willing to add features to their product when the competition is just going to copy it because there is no protection of IP.

      Yet in the world of fashion people come up with new innovative designs every year... generally copies are cheaper too. In the world of science, mathematicians come up with new theorems even though anyone can use the formulas for free. In the world of art, copies are made of successful pictures, movies and music every day and even so artists are constantly training 10-20 years before inventing new art. And even lawyers make money even though anyone can quote the law freely.

      Why would simple tools such as hard drives be any different?

    3. Re:To compete on price you need R&D by The+One+and+Only · · Score: 2, Funny

      You bought an 80-millibyte disk? That's 640 millibits. Why would you only want to store less than two-thirds of a bit?

      --
      In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
    4. Re:To compete on price you need R&D by mangu · · Score: 1
      You bought an 80-millibyte disk?


      No, not at all. That disk had Windows 3.0 installed, and Windows is not case sensitive. You see, no one really cares if he has 80 megabytes or 80 millibytes of viruses installed...

    5. Re:To compete on price you need R&D by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Come on, surely 640mB ought to be enough for anybody! Or something like that...

    6. Re:To compete on price you need R&D by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Normally I wouldn't bother making a comment like yours but what us curious is that the GP wrote capital B for bytes so it's not about being a lazy typer. I guess it's just me but I find people spending effort to get things (non-delibarately) wrong disturbing.

  27. Companies to pirate own products? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm not sure how true this is, but a while ago I was taking a CCNA course and the teacher (who is full of stories) told us that he knows of only one technology company that pirates its own products in China to fight pirates.

    The company is Creative, and apparently when they decided to have manufacturing in China, they pirated their own products there too so they get the pirates' share. Can't beat em, join em ;p

    Might be too late for Samsung to do this now though.

    1. Re:Companies to pirate own products? by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 1

      This is pretty much the exact reason we have region encoding on movies and games. If they can keep us from importing, they can sell it much cheaper in areas like that that would otherwise not pay $50 for a game.

      --
      Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
    2. Re:Companies to pirate own products? by Grail · · Score: 1

      Region encoding for DVDs was only intended to allow staged releases of a movie through different markets. That is, release the movie in the USA for three months, then start selling the DVD there. Then release the movie in some other market, and start selling the DVDs there some time later. Since people weren't supposed to be able to import DVDs from the USA six months before they were available in Australia, the theory was that the movie moguls could maximise their income from limited production resources.

      The fact of the matter is that the Australian consumers just bought region-free DVD players and bought their DVDs on the (much cheaper) USA market, thus leaving the movie companies out in the cold when it came to releasing DVDs in Australia. We'd already seen the movie on DVD before it opened in cinemas here. So now movies have to be released at the same time in all markets, rather than treating half the world as second class citizens.

  28. So go make a good product at a reasonable price by gelfling · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If Prada is mad that their own customers don't actually WANT to pay $1000 for a belt then they are free to not charge a $1000 for a belt. It's not the product that's being pirated, it's the logo and the brand.

    Because let's face reality. All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated. Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from. Samsung contracts phones to the same lines that copy them. The only difference being that the brand name charges more.

    1. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The whole point of designer clothes is that they're expensive and exclusive. Their real customers do want to pay $1000 for a $10 item, but they won't do that if Jane Anyone can get one for $10.

      Fashion designers need to move towards embedding cryptographically signed RFID tags into their clothes, and providing discrete and fashionable readers to enable their clientele to verify that other people are wearing genuine gear.

    2. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by Tweekster · · Score: 1

      That is absolutely not true.

      many times it is the case, but just ask motorola about the H700 bluetooth headsets and the problems with counterfits.

      --
      The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
    3. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by NineNine · · Score: 1

      Because let's face reality. All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated. Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from. Samsung contracts phones to the same lines that copy them. The only difference being that the brand name charges more.

      You willing to stake your life on that? Instead of buying those pricey Bridgestone tires for your car that your wife and kids use, how about buying some very cheap "Ridgestone" tires. They're made in the same plant after all... aren't they? How about hypodermic needles? How about a smoke detector in your house? You want to bet that they're all made in the same plant, now?

      It's one thing if you're talking about designer handbags. It's quite another if you're talking about something that has the possiblity to kill you. Personally, I'll stick with the real "Bridgestone" tires, myself. I'm not willing to risk a blowout at 80 mph in order to save a few bucks.

    4. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by romiz · · Score: 1

      Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from.

      You're wrong.
      A simple search returns this article, which states that Vuitton handbags are produced either in France or Spain.

    5. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by Stiletto · · Score: 1

      If there is no evidence that Bridgestone tires are actually safer than "Ridgestone" tires, than purchasing the higher-priced Bridgestone tires is irrational. You're basically throwing away money for a "B". I would love to have you as a customer.

    6. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Assuming all those products pass the same certification and safety standards (as they generally must do, oddly enough, for specifically the products you mention) buying one over the other because of the word printed on it makes no sense.

      I'm not willing to risk a blowout at all, that's why I make sure my tires pass safety tests. The only thing I check on my tires is if they fit, if they're for the correct season, and if the maximum rated speed for the tire is above the speed I plan to drive at. The name is no more important than if they come in whitewall or not.

      I laugh in the same way at people that won't take my "200 mg Ibuprofen" tablets at work when they beg for a headache suppressant because they wanted "Advil". Morons...

    7. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by Grail · · Score: 1

      If they're made in the same factory, why are the Ridgestones being sold as Ridgestones instead of Bridgestones? It occurs to me that Bridgestone will pull out the cream of the crop and let the "lesser" tyres be sold under a different brand - this means Bridgestone gets the best tyres from the lot, but the manufacturing costs are lower due to volume.

      Certainly, if there's no evidence that a 5% difference in tyre hardness can significantly reduce collision speeds, go ahead and buy the Ridgestones.

      If the products are totally identical, go ahead an buy the Ridgestones. But the products won't be totally identical.

    8. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by yvanthegreat · · Score: 1

      So you're saying it's absolutely not true, but most of the time it is?

    9. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by Tweekster · · Score: 1

      Are you a Nazi or an idiot?

      or both.

      --
      The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
    10. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by jimicus · · Score: 1

      That would explain why there are so many knockoffs available in markets in the Canary Islands. Perhaps the Far East isn't the only area where a handful of people keep the machines going for a few hours after the original order has been fulfilled?

    11. Re:So go make a good product at a reasonable price by yvanthegreat · · Score: 1

      Jeez. I'm just interpretting your text exactly like you wrote it. If that is a reason to insult me, then I guess I know where you learned the word 'Nazi'...

  29. The best way... by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

    to pacify a communist nation, is to export capitalism to it. It worked with Russia. Or...would you rather face another cold-war?

    Dealing with a communist nation is a bitch aint it? Here's hoping to change the tide through capitalism rather than war.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
    1. Re:The best way... by Grym · · Score: 1

      What "worked" with Russia was a dangerous game of military/industrial brinkmanship that should never be repeated again.

      -Grym

    2. Re:The best way... by opkool · · Score: 1

      to pacify a communist nation, is to export capitalism to it. It worked with Russia.

      Errr, excuse me?

      Inside Russia:
      A KGB leader rules he country, were mafias run rampant, foreigners get killed in the streets, petty wars are fought abroad, and regime-critics get killed.

      Outside Rusia:
      Blocking resolutions against Iran developing the bomb, providing funds to terrorist group (seems like a good way to keep the West troubled and give free ride to Russia as "it does not matter anymore"), the tactics of cutting gas supplies to neighbours and trying to own strategic European infrastructure and industries. And, of course, killing of disidents abroad with radioactive material.

      I say Russia is back as the enemy of the West. And this includes the USofA

      Peace!

    3. Re:The best way... by WilliamSChips · · Score: 1

      By "pacify" you mean completely wreck so that the citizens have their standard of living brought even lower than it already was under the USSR?

      --
      Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
    4. Re:The best way... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It didn't work.

      To many people is getting executed by the leadership.

  30. why is this illiegal? by fermion · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I could, in principle, copy a phone, say the motorola RAZR, call it something else, and sell it. There should be nothing wrong with this. Innovation and ingenuity is promoted by such action. Perhaps one reason that the technology in the West, particularly the US is so backwards is because we protect manufacturers against the need to innovate. That one can expect a product to survive for years, without innovation, is silly.

    As most of us know, the rules of patents and copyrights are there to allow an innovator to recoup expenses and some profit. We have taken it to the point where the rules are now used to insure financial security for the entire corporation into perpetuity. It seems like now that manufacture is so cheap, and the design process is so streamlined, that the big shops should be able to get a products refreshed pretty frequently. The big reason that large firms cannot is the sheer amount of overhead these mammoth corporations carry. Many will complain, like the car companies, that things like health care adds 5-10% to every car. But how much does overhead like luxury building, private airplanes, and golden parachutes add?

    Perhaps if money was put into hiring and training people, and encouraging innovation, we would have nothing to fear from the knockoff artist.

    --
    "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
    1. Re:why is this illiegal? by NineNine · · Score: 1

      could, in principle, copy a phone, say the motorola RAZR, call it something else, and sell it. There should be nothing wrong with this.

      Where did you get your morals? Church? You seriously see nothing wrong with letting somebody else do all of the hard work inventing something, and you just copying it? That's one of the most morally bankrupt statement I've read in a long time. When was the last time YOU invented something useful and let somebody else profit off of it? (I'm guessing never)

    2. Re:why is this illiegal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      You know, this sense of entitlement is really annoying. I have done a bit of hard work, so now I deserve to be paid, even if the work is of low quality or if no one really wants what I produced. What is next, mandatory tips for the washer of windows at intersections. Even worse are the supposedly brilliant executives that go up to washington for thier annual suckle at the public teat. Just because you have an exorbitant salary, that means that the public has a responsibility to insure that salary always happens, or buy you out at the public expense.

      Though the real fallacy here is the idea that innovations are immaculately conceived. The iPod was not the first MP3 player. Watt did not develop the steam engine on his own, or without nicking some ideas that weren't his to nick. Most people who have the credit probably did not due the bulk of the work, but they took the initiative to market. The wright brothers did not pull an airplane out of a hat. They took the initiative to make it marketable.

      I think the best analogy is from Feynman. Most of us are pigs, working really hard to find the truffle. As soon as we find it, we get hit over the head by someone who will take the truffle and sell it for lots of money. It is not fair, but I dare say if we lived in this world instead of the fantasy world of entitlements, the web bubble, the housing bubble, the great depression, might not ever have happened.

    3. Re:why is this illiegal? by fatphil · · Score: 1

      What do you mean by 'copy' the razr? Produce a lookalike, behave-alike?
      Or do you mean you reverse engineer the interfaces, copy its ROMs and run Motorola's code on your clone?

      --
      Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
    4. Re:why is this illiegal? by Sassinak · · Score: 1

      There is a world of difference between creating a product that looks and acts similar to an existing product (its been done millions of times over by anyone and everyone. Hence why products are being forced cheaper. Lets be honest. The person who first sold the toaster oven got laughed at. Once sales started, what did other manufactures do: they MADE SIMILAR (if not IDENTICAL) products. This is not a "asia vs. us" thing. This is a "manufacturer vs. manufacturer" thing. wrapping up a concept in legal rubbish like, you make something similar and I'll sue you is foolish and certainly restricts innovation. (so they copy you, big falcon deal. you add more "things" (features, cost, pretty people, etc...) to make yours more attractive than the others. a knockoff is just that, a knockoff. a copy. innoviation is not their thing, its replication.

      How many TVs, phones, cars, etc... are there on the market again? And how many of them do the same thing as the others in their same catagory?.. Ummm...

      However, I will say, it gets dirty and illegal if someone copies my item from stolen blueprints and copied code. That is certainly more than a knockoff, that is a direct copy which is wrong.

      --
      God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board -- Mark Twain Look for http://Thebar.steelbeachca
    5. Re:why is this illiegal? by fatphil · · Score: 1

      """
      There is a world of difference between creating a product that looks and acts similar to an existing product (its been done millions of times over by anyone and everyone.
      """

      Please close your parenthesis. Then add the "and [something else]" clause to your "There is a world of difference between [something]" non-sentence. Then we can try and work out what your argument really is.

      --
      Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
  31. that depends on what is bootleged.... automobiles? by johnpaul191 · · Score: 1

    i could see a consumer taking a risk on a bootleg CD or DVD. in general it is a digital copy, and unless the movie was film handheld inside a theater, the quality will probably be ok. the cost is low and the risk is low. ethics aside, it's not going to kill you.
    when you get into the world of pirated automobiles..... um. i don't even know what to think about that. makes you wonder how they can be competitive. that's obviously a massive operation employing a ton of people.
    i feel like i need to look into what a "pirated/bootleg car" actually means?

  32. Luddite legacy IPR good for some bad for US by OldHawk777 · · Score: 1

    Luddite legacy IPR good for some bad for US, because you cannot enforce the present IPR laws (due to technology always changes) globally or locally; Therefor, the Luddite legacy IPR laws are failures

    Luddite legacy (industrial-age) IPR is a failure and exceptionally harmful to US, EU ... and other well developed economies that blindly insist on continuing a failed IPR system, you change words and phrases, but maintain the anti-competitive structure of an International Luddite legacy IPR system. It is time for US and EU to lead the international community in moving towards a Global Open-competition economic architecture and quickly away from protectionist legacy economic models. A Global Open-competition economic architecture that rewards productive innovation and deters creative, developmental, research ... sharing of information.

    An IPR system needs to reward performance and productivity. (1) We must allow globally the free (non-monetary/financial) use and sharing of all information, copyrights, patents ...; ALSO, we must reward all owners of information, copyrights, patents ... production/services that has a marketable product financial value (including when it wins friends/influences people). (2) No IPR holder can prevent free (non-monetary/financial) use by any person, company ... country for creativity, product development, scientific research ... educational sharing (Binding court arbitration on the proportional sharing of performance profits). (3) All IPR falls in the public-domain, but all property falls in the (as determined by law and court) public or private. (4) Obvious/Public patents/IPR will be determined at the time of binding court arbitration (judge and independent empaneled topic experts) on the proportional sharing of performance profits, and any attempt by an arbitration participant to defraud the court or other participants will be considered criminal (big fine, 2-10 years in jail).

    I think, EFF, ACLU, and the FSF-GPL folks could manage developing a damn good and functional International Open-IPR treaty, but the USA Congress, EU, and others are still beholding to the corporatist special-interest more than the Public's/Citizens' and/or National interest. IPRs should be productivity based control ... not I filed it, I got it, you cannot have or use it (which is counter productive stupidity).

    --
    Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
    1. Re:Luddite legacy IPR good for some bad for US by cdrguru · · Score: 1

      OK, so all IP is free for use. Why would anyone spend the resources (hours, dollars, whatever) to come up with something new knowing that anyone else can take their design (IP) and make the product somewhere else?

      Today, mostly the only thing of value is the research or knowledge behind the product. If you can bypass that and steal the design or knowledge or process then you can make the product in parallel with the original designer. Of course, since it cost nothing to develop the design or process then you can sell it much, much cheaper. In any reasonable economy, the first designer loses everything - they are selling the same product for 10x the cost.

  33. Not Just About Price by AC5398 · · Score: 1

    * The manufacturers of the "genuine" products will need to compete based on price. *

    They don't just need to compete based on price, but on features, particularly products with artificial restrictions on them. Any hardware for the entertainment industry comes to mind here.

    For example, I wanted an mp3 player that acted as a USB key device, played/recorded FM radio, allowed me to drag and drop my mp3 files, didn't restrict me in regards to any form of DRM, and worked using AA batteries. If it worked as a voice recorder, that was an added bonus. I looked around and most of the mp3 players were powered using a built-in rechargeable battery, and the ones that weren't ran on AAA batteries. The only model I could find that used AA batteries is the Iriver T10.

    The T10 looked like it could act as a USB key device, play/record FM radio, and work using AA batteries. So I purchased it, took it home and found out it would only allow me to upload mp3 files to it via Windows Media Player. The promised 'turn it into a drag and drop mp3 files device' firmware upgrade did not work. A cursory check via Google revealed that older, unavailable firmware upgrades did work, and that others encountered the same issues as myself with the current firmware upgrade.

    I took the T10 back for a full refund and sent an irate email off to Iriver. At this point, if an obvious Iriver bootleg mp3 player came on the market, calling itself the Riveri, so long as the damn thing did what I want it to, I'd buy it. And when I went looking for its replacement in the future, my first choice of mp3 player wouldn't be Iriver, I'd go looking for Riveri products.

    Same for next-gen DVDs and their players, computers, hell, widgets of all types.

    Price wouldn't be the issue, features/restrictions are. The bootlegger isn't restricted by agreements with music corporations and film studios or PATENT OWNERS so I wouldn't expect their devices to cater to the music corporation/film studio/patent owner requirements. I'd expect the bootlegger would put MY requirements first, and in a market where both original and bootlegger products have the same quality, the bootlegger would have a competitive edge over the original manufacturer.

  34. Will brands disappear? by Infonaut · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated.

    Very good point. Ultimately, brands are the creation of marketing more than anything else. Marketing until now has been based primarily on the notion that you must bombard customers with awareness of your brand in order to get them to buy your products. Otherwise, how will they know the difference between your product and that of your competitor?

    However, brands to play the important role of giving consumers some assurance about the level of quality of the goods they are buying. A creator of knock-offs can make a series of knock-offs, making money on each product run, whether the product is any good or not. But the brand company will see its reputation suffer if its products suck.

    Then again, there are plenty of brand products that seem to survive on marketing alone. The products are no better than cheaper alternatives, and all you pay for is the label. Clothing is a perfect example of this. The design is the same, but add the Prada logo and it immediately becomes 3x as expensive. Granted, Prada has to pay its designers, and the knock-off company doesn't. But there do seem to be some industries that have profit margins that can only be explained by the presence of branding. Remove the branding and the same breadth of products might still be on offer; profit margins for companies creating the designs would simply be lower.

    I don't think brands will go away any time soon. Some people simply must have their branded luxury goods. But the availability of cheap alternatives that are as good or almost as good will probably continue to surge. In a world where people can share product ratings and opinions rapidly, the ability of brand merchants to control the market is weaker.

    --
    Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
  35. But they didn't get it by paniq · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No. Windows Genuine Advantage doesn't help the least against imitation.

    And honestly, I rather prefer the imitation.

    --
    Do not trust this signature.
    1. Re:But they didn't get it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >No. Windows Genuine Advantage doesn't help the least against imitation. And honestly, I rather prefer the imitation.

      Imitation OS: We leave out the usability to save you money! Try one today!

      I kid! I kid! Jeez, you guys have no sense of humor...

    2. Re:But they didn't get it by kimvette · · Score: 1

      I take it you are referring to ReactOS? ;)

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
  36. It is the companies own fault by WindBourne · · Score: 1

    These companies are sending their top designs to China knowing full well that the designs will be spread around. Having your old stuff built in china is one thing, but having your top of the line built there is asking for issues. Sorry, but all of these companies know that the Chinese gov. actually encourages this, so I blame them, not the Chinese.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  37. labor costs? by johnpaul191 · · Score: 1

    it's a stab in the dark, but if you are going to build super-plants and shave every penny, i am guessing China is cheaper than India for manufacturing. China also is relatively accessible to the western coast of the USA by freighters, and has a billion potential workers that can be paid less than India.

    Obviously India *had* a large pool of well educated workers that could be paid less than the USA. if you look at a map, it seems that shipping from India adds some twists and turns that China does not. i don't know how much of an issue that is, but if it's uneasy waters, then i am sure it matters. using India for tech support type work just means you have to run a set of cables there, not move super-freighters in and out.

    again, i am just guessing. i am sure the governments themselves are a major issue, but when you deal in those kinds of volume... every little bit counts. China was wise to do this manufacturing. they are brought up to speed with what the world in making. they have their hands in most cutting edge technology, so no matter what their own home grown scientists and engineers can accomplish, they also get a peek at the rest of the world.

    i don't know if it is true, but i had heard that the Korean car manufacturers learned a TON about design and manufacturing efficiency from the years they spent building cars for the Japanese companies. that's why they can be so competitive, and then just learn where to shave off some costs to stay cheaper. it's nothing new. a lot of American manufacturing plants have only stayed competitive by adapting to Japanese styles of running a plant. it does not work in some cases, but when it does, it will blow everything else out of the water. there are plenty of books written about converting an old american plant to a new (japanese based) method of manufacturing. it does not *all* come down to labor costs.

  38. I Told You So by ewhac · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The issue of unsanctioned copying ("piracy") comes up on Slashdot every so often. The ensuing discussion eventually boils down to one group shrieking that inventions and artistic creations are "property" and that their "owners" should enjoy absolute control over their disposition; and another group shrieking that imposing such control is tantamount to hoarding and tyrrany, and is socially unredeeming.

    I have chosen to look at Reality, something that's been out of fashion since the 2000 US elections. The realities are that science and technology continue to advance and, as a consequence, abundance increases as cost decreases.

    In a sense, the computer represents the ultimate achievement in manufacturing, at least as far as bits are concerned: Infinite abundance at zero cost. You can make an infinite number of copies of a digital work for no incremental cost. You are constrained only by the amount of storage you have, and the available energy to run the computer.

    I wrote an essay on this subject over ten years ago, vaguely exploring the economic and social ramifications of such manufacturing capability. I've also posted here extensively on the subject. My main thrust was that defective recorded media (DRM) and other forms of copy protection were childish attempts to wish away reality, and that cheap copying was not only not going to go away, but proliferate. I argued that the economy existing in the memories of our computers -- where a given instance of an artifact was inherently valueless -- would one day "leak out" into the physical sphere. I argued that we needed to be prepared for this day, and that the realm of digital media served as an ideal place in which to try out new economic models and risk/reward structures -- structures and conventions that fundamentally acknowledged that digital artifacts were easily and infinitely copyable. I argued that this day was coming, whether we prepared for it or not. I argued that, if we didn't prepare for it, we would be seriously fscked.

    Well, guess what? It looks like it's starting to happen.

    We are not yet seeing anything close to computer-like ease of duplication, but even this meager advance in physical manufacturing is already causing what could be serious socioeconomic repercussions. Do not think for one moment that manufacturing is somehow going to get "harder" again. Absent a regional plague or war, this issue is only going to accelerate. Manufacturing costs will continue to fall and manufacturing centers will become more prolific as the technology of manufacturing itself becomes smaller and cheaper. Hell, 3D "printers" have fallen below the USD$10,000.00 mark. How long before you can pick them up in BestBuy?

    This is not going to go away, and you are not going to stop it or slow it down with silly little notions like copy protection or WTO/WIPO trade agreements. You need to change your thinking. You need to prepare for this. Otherwise... Well, let's just say the social chaos of today's Iraq will look like a parlor game in comparison.

    Schwab

    --
    Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
    1. Re:I Told You So by NineNine · · Score: 1

      This is not going to go away, and you are not going to stop it or slow it down with silly little notions like copy protection or WTO/WIPO trade agreements. You need to change your thinking. You need to prepare for this. Otherwise... Well, let's just say the social chaos of today's Iraq will look like a parlor game in comparison.

      You're right. What do you suggest? If you're saying that lawsuits don't work, then the only obvious answer is to simply stop spending on R&D, because you know that you'll never recoup those costs.

    2. Re:I Told You So by cdrguru · · Score: 1

      So, in your view pretty much the economic foundation of the Western world is going to come crashing down? This is about the only result I can see of people spending R&D dollars without any hope of recouping them - they will stop spending that money. Nobody will invest in a startup where the unlimited piracy of the IP that they are investing in is invitable.

      So, do you have any ideas on how one "prepares" for this? Do we hope that we elect wise leaders that just take over the idea of funding R&D in the future with tax money? Or, are we all just working for the State with the knowledge that they are going to take care of us?

    3. Re:I Told You So by ewhac · · Score: 1
      So, do you have any ideas on how one "prepares" for this? Do we hope that we elect wise leaders that just take over the idea of funding R&D in the future with tax money? Or, are we all just working for the State with the knowledge that they are going to take care of us?

      If the question you're asking is, "How do we rearrange the pieces on the chessboard?" the answer is, "You don't, because you need to start learning to play Go."

      It will be a different game. You won't be competing for artifacts or resources. You will be competing for reputation, since that's what will drive people to your door. Once they're at your door, then you can manage access to your remaining scarce resource -- your time -- and bill accordingly.

      This requires you to go out and learn what's actually important to people. Which reputation elements are they seeking to maximize when they search for a product or service? Which can you do consistently better than anyone else? In the case of Samsung's plight, this is research they can do now to improve their position.

      I don't profess to have a complete solution. I don't have the Jeffersonian level of wisdom to come up with one. All I have so far are some general ideas and directions in which to start exploring. This is why I encourage people here to think about it.

      Schwab

      --
      Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
    4. Re:I Told You So by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Isn't the whole point of the OSS business model to move to a service economy?

      It's not clear to me that the OSS business model works, but it's one example of an industry moving towards a non-scarce paradigm of economy.

      In other words, R&D may yet become more important than ever.

    5. Re:I Told You So by wall0159 · · Score: 1


      I read and liked your essay. In particular, I liked this line:

      "I predict matter replicators are certain to be invented, because they're just too cool not to be" ..that's awesome! :-)

      There are problems, though, with everyone being able to arrange atoms however they wish. It would allow awful terrorism - potentially easily obliterating the Earth (grey-goo scenario), and for this reason I think most people will (rightly or wrongly) support strict controls on their use. Such controls are almost certain to include provisions for copyright protection (maybe a scenario like in The Diamond Age, where the device is networked, and one can only produce certain preset objects), etc.

      The thought has occured to me before, though, and it's an interesting one...

    6. Re:I Told You So by kellererik · · Score: 1

      I don't want to nitpick, but there were people in 'Diamond Age' successfully circumventing the requirement of being networked and getting the 'Source' from a sanctioned outlet. They provided their own - in that case illegal - 'Source' to manufacture things; and that is exactly what is going to happen, sooner or later.
      Let's assume that DRM is the sanctioned way to access the 'Source' ... ;-)
      Neil is kind of a prophet, isn't he?

      my 2 cents

    7. Re:I Told You So by mxpule · · Score: 1

      I enjoyed your essay also, but the solutions you offer won't work.

      This radical line of thought makes our current model of capitalist-driven R&D completely unsustainable. Your assay has already come true for the pharma industry:

      Take the new-drug development pipeline: A new therapeutic concept is dreamt up - a novel biological pathway is to be targeted. First, candidate protein components are identified and thousands upon thousands of small molecules which bind these proteins and may disrupt the pathway are designed, synthesized and tested in vitro. From these, a handful are tested in vivo. Fewer then make it to toxicity testing in experiments requiring large numbers of animals. Next phase I, II and III clinical trials are performed at considerable financial cost but more crucially, at tremendous cost in time (years)! Notably, there are no guarantees that the trials will be successful or that the nascent drug is safe. Finally with regulatory approval, the pharma company can start to make a profit and recoup the tremendous R&D costs detailed above.

      Crucially, the cost of actual synthesis of pharmaceuticals is trivial. A 'pirate' company in an unregulated part of the world can make a very decent profit by offering a perfect duplicate of the new drug for a fraction of the developer's cost. Your arguments about brand loyalty etc don't hold - all the customer needs is to trust that the 'pirate' has a good clean room and decent chemists; the two molecules will be identical, all the hard-work has already been done. Nobody will pay 100-1000x for a drug for brand loyalty. This is an incredible 'short-circuit' on the industry.

      If you extrapolate this to a world-wide free-for-all, *no* private R&D will ever be done. Why would anyone invest (waste) their money in anything other than manufacture? If your predictions come true, the only solution is that the public purse funds all R&D, and that all new knowledge becomes automatically free and open and industry concerns itself only with manufacture. It sounds bizarre and goes completely against the grain of our current culture

    8. Re:I Told You So by slashbart · · Score: 1

      Interesting thread!
      Your thoughts remind me of the SF book A voyage from yesteryear by James Patrick Hogan. In this book there is a planet with people on it that have never had any need for materially competing with each other, because they were raised by robots from a starship, and a robots provide everything they could possibly need. These people get their selfrespect from actually being able to do something well, it's their only measure. It doesn't really matter what they're good at, as long as it's something. Our "I've got more than you do" society meets their society, and the results are quite interesting.
      Bart

    9. Re:I Told You So by espressojim · · Score: 1

      This almost seems like a push to go back to 'trade secrets'. You could copy the molecule we developed in the lab, but since there aren't any patents, we're not going to publish the spec of the new compound, or the lab procedure to produce it.

      Wasn't that the situation in a way before patents, and the whole reason patents were supposed to be 'for the public good'? I think that patents should stick around, but should be limited to exclude 'business practices', and should be time limited to a reasonable length of time (5-7 years? Meta data studies using existing data should be done to determine a fair 'break even' point.)

      Everything should go into the public domain, and trade secrets prevent that. I'm still mad that I don't know the secret blend of 11 herbs and spices.

    10. Re:I Told You So by Bastard+of+Subhumani · · Score: 1
      You could copy the molecule we developed in the lab, but since there aren't any patents, we're not going to publish the spec of the new compound,
      What do you mean by the "spec" of a compound? I'd call that a formula, e.g. C2H5-OH. With a sample of the product and a good lab, that can be found. As to copying the molecule, knowing the formula sounds like a pretty good starting point, if not a strict prerequisite (i.e. you can make beer without knowing the chemistry involved).
      --
      Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
    11. Re:I Told You So by espressojim · · Score: 1

      The barrier to entry is still much higher than a patent, where the specification of the product and the process to produce it are specifically written out.

      That would give you additional time to take advantage of your R&D. I thought that was the point of this thread.

  39. apples and oranges by oohshiny · · Score: 1

    Driving down the cost of disk storage to $0.50/G requires real R&D. It's also a self-protecting market: the 2-3 years that a company may have an advantage in this area, it gets, without patents, simply from the expertise that they have and nobody else does.

    The latest "brand name designs" rarely if ever contain any innovation beyond taking advantage of the latest smaller battery or whatever; what companies are trying to recoup there is not R&D, but advertising.

  40. Trajectory by Colin+Smith · · Score: 1

    But the Japanese did move on and now seem to be inventing and creating a lot of things, and I think the Chinese will too. But the question becomes what will become of the West?There's a habit of examining past trends and then extrapolating them into the future like a trajectory. If they're catching up with us that fast then what happens when they've caught up, we'll be doomed. No. When they've caught up, they'll be in exactly the same situation we are, having to do lots of expensive research, development for the smallest advance.

    What'll become of the west? We'll become equal trading partners, no more, no less. We'll have to work hard to compete, that's all.

    --
    Deleted
  41. So my TV is not legit? by aristotle-dude · · Score: 3, Funny

    Are you saying my Sorny is not legit? What about my Magnetbox VCR or my Panaphonic DVD player?

    --
    Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
    1. Re:So my TV is not legit? by kimvette · · Score: 1

      Pfft. I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny! I know those brands you're talking about!

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
  42. I'll tell you why. by artifex2004 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Why we continue to give away jobs to a big communist cheater and run up a big bubble-risky trade deficit with them, I'll never know.


    It's all about the pricing and availability of goods. Go do an inventory of your house, or even just your bedroom, and find how many of your things are imported.
    And now that lower-skilled jobs are being exported over there, fewer Americans can fit the "union tax" into their budgets, assuming the US goods meet the same quality.

    1. Re:I'll tell you why. by RMH101 · · Score: 1

      "or even just your bedroom"
      Oi! That's my wife you're talking about!

  43. Fakes? by Colin+Smith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sure they look very similar but fake? The phone isn't claiming to be an LG, or the game a PSP as far as I can see. It's a clone, not a fake. It's not like the phone and other tech manufacturers don't rip each other off mercilessly. Do you believe for a second that companies don't "reverse engineer" each other's products within minutes of them hitting the street? Before if they can find a way get away with it.

    Really what they're pissed about is the fact that the chinese are just better at it than they are.

    The solution? Release the stuff in China first, nobody wants to be seen to have a knock off. Hell, it has by far the biggest market so it even makes sense.

    --
    Deleted
    1. Re:Fakes? by Aladrin · · Score: 1

      no rich people want to be seen to have a knock off.

      There, I fixed that for you. There are plenty of people who can't afford the name brand (and still eat for the rest of the month) and would be GLAD to purchase knockoff Oakleys at the flea market for 1/100th of the price.

      --
      "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
  44. Car example by Espectr0 · · Score: 1

    Daewoo used to make a car called "daewoo matiz". Daewoo went broke, and chevrolet bought them, changing the name of the car to "chevrolet spark".

    China found out about the impending release of the chevrolet spark, a company called Chery cloned it into the Chevy QQ. It outsells the spark 5 to 1.

    Chevrolet is not amused, in fact is has a lawsuit against Chery because they copied their design (the car is pretty similar) and beat them to market too.

    --
    Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
    1. Re:Car example by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not true.

      Chery (the only large privately owned car manufacture in China) has original IP, and the car was designed by an Italian firm. GM, which was trying to delay the launch of QQ, lost the case, and the Chery QQ is selling well in Europe and Mideast.

  45. Re:China vs. India by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The Indians (1) aggressively develop nuclear weapons, (2) refuse to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT)

    India is a nation of a billion people with a history spanning several thousand years; what reason on earth is there that they should not have nuclear weapons if second rate nations like the UK and France and military dictatorships like Russia have them?

    and (3) shove their surplus labor onto the USA.

    Quite to the contrary: the Indian government doesn't like the brain drain and is trying to stop it. It's the US government and US companies that lure away the best and the brightest from India to fill labor needs in the US.

  46. P.P.S. by fliptout · · Score: 1

    Having lived in China and discussed the matter with my history prof aunt, China is indeed going through the growing pains the USA went through around the end of the 19th century. The rapid industrialization, environmental issues, and labor issues resemble what happened in the USA. The cities in China are swelling, due to their shift from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one. China is a special case, because they are basically jumping ahead a century in terms of technology in the span of 20 years.

    --
    A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
  47. Overpaid Westerners by Simonetta · · Score: 1

    This silly idea that the West will do the 'brainwork', the conceptualizations, design, and marketing while the East will do the manufacturing and support is finally showing its weakest point. That is the assumption that the brainwork and the handwork are actually equal.

        In reality the hand-work, the manufacturing and support is much more important. The brainwork is absurdly overpaid. The West would be well advised to rebuild their factories and discard their media/celebrity obsessed culture before they find that they have sunk to the level that China was 100 years ago.

        No chance of that actually happening, though.

    1. Re:Overpaid Westerners by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Uh, how many of these products are being innovated in the countries that are manufacturing them - few if any. So, the innovation is very important, but it is impossible to actually recover these costs unless you have patents/copyrights/etc. Oh, sure, if you're talking about some product that cost 2 man months to develop you can sell support/etc. However, if you're taking something that required 40 engineers working for three years using expensive equipment then there is no question that the R&D is a huge part of the product's cost - it just is the part that only the first-to-market has to do.

      The only reason engineers/scientists/etc are paid well is because that is what the market demands. If you could hire them for peanuts it would happen. It isn't like big industry WANTS to pay more for R&D than it needs to.

  48. Globalization's curse showing through. by sethstorm · · Score: 1

    When I was a kid "Made in Japan" meant it was something cheap and crappy.
    Now you can replace cheap with small *cough*Kei cars, Civics, Echos, Scions*cough*. Now if they allowed Europe to design them and get them to a tenth of $200000 level without involving Asia/Africa/Central & South America while retaining the performance, they might have a chance.

    As for China, they still hold that title Japan once did to its fullest by the looks of the materials. Even on $3000 laptops or $10000+ servers the lack of quality shows- compared to hardware, steel, and plastic made in EU/US the hardware wouldn't be something I'd want to trust implicitly.

    Maybe globalization is getting to be a bad idea when you allow companies to bypass domestic preference laws (CKD & rebrand of various electronics to hide actual manufacturer, Honda's bypasses of US/UK domestic preference laws via part percentage exploitation or factory building in target country), take jobs with no respect to the displacement(informal precedent set long before tech jobs went in 2003) , and lower quality across the board.


    There are some ideas that economists will never understand. Those ideas also have the benefit of actually working.

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
  49. Been going on for ages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Textiles were first. Target sells mens clothing (dress, and casual) that's virtually identical to the . The only difference I saw was comperable quality and a lower price. Food markets have been doing this for ages with 'store branded' products. (SafeWay, Vons, Trader Joes to name a few). Now the risks are far greater. If I get SafeWay select (aka the in store knock off) Tea I might get tea that's more tonic. Mabie it's been made by a small family that simply can't compete who knows. The American government has only it self to blame- Refusese to get socialised in important areas: Econimics, Polotics, Education, and health care. As a result fewer and fewer people can afford the astronomically high costs of living here. When our economy colapses from incompetant leadership people should thank three things: George W. Bush, Greed, and shortsighted planning. (Arguable all three come from the same gene pool)

  50. So this is how I get a job at Samsung? by entropy123 · · Score: 1

    I am way poor and underemployed. I have tried and tried to get interviews at Samsung, Hitachi, IBM and other major companies to no effect. They don't want me. They don't even want to talk with me. No I have it, I just need to start making illegal knockoffs of their main products and wait for them to come to me with a lucrative job offer!

  51. Re:China vs. India by Gentlewhisper · · Score: 1
    India is a nation of a billion people with a history spanning several thousand years; what reason on earth is there that they should not have nuclear weapons if second rate nations like the UK and France and military dictatorships like Russia have them?


    For what it is worth thousands of years worth of indian civilization has only resulted in slave labour through their twisted indian caste systems. In less than the same time "second rate nations" like UK and France has evolved to a more enlightened form of government. What reason indeed, I suppose that answers your question well enough.
    --
    Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
  52. I am glad I saw your post.... by zogger · · Score: 1

    ...I was scrolling down through all the replies and was *amazed* no one had spotted how to fight the counterfeits. When I got to the bottom I was going to post the solution, but now I'll just reply to yours and give serious brain props to Creative if this is the case. This is the ONLY practical way to counter the counterfeits. I you invent the thing, and manufacturing is the same, just kill them off with price and flood the market. That's it. I am glad at least one company "gets it". Now , if only the RIAA and MPAA would get it with their stupid entertainment disks and ridiculous over pricing schemes, all they need to do is match the pirates cost on disks or close to allofmp3 on download.

      OK, there is technically one other way that can work with manufactured items. You ONLY build to spec for a specific client or clients, so much down, so much on delivery, and don't even try to just generally sell the whatevers, and then don't care if they are counterfeited then, just ignore it. Get the idea, design to spec for a customer or customers, do your limited manufacturing run, then move on to the next product. And there you have it, the high volume anything goes way and the limited volume guaranteed money way.

  53. Well there ya go... by Tinman_au · · Score: 1

    "Sell these products do"

    I didn't know Yoda works for IT Wire!

  54. Re:that depends on what is bootleged.... automobil by timeOday · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "Pirated" might include the grey market, which is products ligitimately produced for another market but imported where it doesn't "belong" (arbitrage). Or, I also heard of a Chinese shoe factory that lost its contract to produce a well-known brand of shoes. So what did they do? They kept making the shoes, ignoring the middleman (the US branding company). The shoes hadn't changed, they simply hadn't been "blessed." A "bootleg" could just be the factory going beyond their order and producing extras. I wonder how far up the chain of command one would have to go in a car company to sneak out a few extra copies?

  55. More to the point... by Namarrgon · · Score: 1

    Doubt they'd care much if other companies copied their products. They depend on cheap exports, not original exports.

    The thing that happened to every other country in China's situation was that individuals within the country started innovating, and wanted some return for that. They're the ones that are going to get pissed off by copies from other Chinese. That's what prompted the development of the concept of intellectual property in the first place (that, and patent laws).

    Of course, this assumes individuals can actually get recompense for their innovations, something that doesn't happen in a pure communist system. Then again, China is no longer a pure communist system, and appears to be slowly but steadily moving in the capitalist direction.

    --
    Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
  56. YES! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm glad to see the free markets and free trade in action. May China be blessed by Ayn Rand!

  57. Been Going On For Decades by Master+of+Transhuman · · Score: 1


    I read a book twenty years ago about "industrial espionage" which also covered "piracy". Then it was Taiwan and Hong Kong that was the source of this sort of thing. The author of the book discovered that the Chinese had a network of companies set up who could reproduce the guts of the thing being copied, the packaging, the distribution, the whole nine yards.

    At least one clothing company did what Samsung in the article tried to do - buy them out. They found a Chinese knockoff company, bought them, then released the product under their own name as their "budget brand".

    Nothing wrong with the practice except when the "pirates" put the original company name on the product - that's fraud and should be exposed, if not punished. As long as the company doesn't promote the product as the original company's product, who cares?

    --
    Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
  58. Not how it works at all by Ogemaniac · · Score: 1

    Here is something more realistic: Your company makes cell-phones. You find that SuperPlastic, from Chemical Company X works great - but it is pretty pricey. So you send some to your firm's analytical department (or one of the many for hire), reverse engineer it, and then either start manufacturing it yourself or contract some cheap Chinese firm to do it for you. This would take less than a year in most cases. Without IP to protect it, Chemical Company X is out of luck. All the money it spent on R&D, as well as the free development samples it likely gave away, are now wasted.

    IP may have some serious problems in the world of computer code, but actually works quite well for most inventions.

    1. Re:Not how it works at all by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1
      Here is something more realistic: Your company makes cell-phones. You find that SuperPlastic, from Chemical Company X works great - but it is pretty pricey. So you send some to your firm's analytical department (or one of the many for hire), reverse engineer it, and then either start manufacturing it yourself or contract some cheap Chinese firm to do it for you. This would take less than a year in most cases. Without IP to protect it, Chemical Company X is out of luck. All the money it spent on R&D, as well as the free development samples it likely gave away, are now wasted.

      One year of monopoly power for an "innovation" as bland as a new style of cell phone is good enough, as far as I'm concerned.

  59. Reply: Luddite legacy IPR good for some bad for US by OldHawk777 · · Score: 1

    Read the paragraph starting with "An IPR system needs to reward performance and productivity."

    The Deal: If there is no value in a useless or unused patent, copyright ... IPR, then no reward/compensation. Private property cannot be taken by anyone to obtain/create private gain without the IPR owner being compensated; ALSO, Public property as in GPL, OpenContent/CreativeCommons ... cannot be diluted by attachment to IPR private property, but when it is determined by court arbitration to be in the best interest of the general public the IPR private-property can be converted to GPL/Open-public property with a public payment compensation to the IPR owner as determined appropiet by an IPR court/judge and expert-panel/jury. Private/Public users of software, music, DVD ...media/content cannot be resticted in their private personal/home use of the IPR item after paying the original product source a single licence fee for using the IPR property; Therefor, media and content copyright/IPR owners would retain their rights as long as that version (same song, actors, content/media) was purchased, but when the artist goes to another company the songs, poems ... IPR content right remain with the writer, creator ... not the performer or RIAA companies.

    When an IPR property is used for any form of financial gain (money, trade, influence) then the owner must be compensated.

    The IPR owner has no right to restrict or prevent the use of the IPR item by anyone anyplace.

    If the IPR is never used or is used, but does not result in gain for anyone, then no one pays anything for the use of the IPR item for research, development, personal use, educational use ....

    Your Question: "Why would anyone spend the resources?" for the same reason as now to make money from thier efforts if the IPR proves to have any value in the marketplace, but not until value is proven by production contracts and/or court arbitration.

    IOW: Performance, innovation, and productivity cannot be stopped or prevented and compensation will always depend on Performance, innovation, and productivity on a global/local scale.

    --
    Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
  60. If not price, then what? by dafing · · Score: 1
    Just asking, so if they dont try and compete on price, how do they compete? Fact is, company x makes more money selling a lot of cheaper phones that "only" have a camera etc, than their absolute top of the line smartphone with gps etc. There comes a point where every company needs to get a budget range, but what do you do when your well priced, fairly standard phones are getting knocked off, and sold even cheaper?

    I love Apple as a company, but you cant just make up a brand image overnight, and for a certain model. You cant tell all the Chinese people (and others, although the story is about whats going on in China) that the "KY178 will get you laid" and expect that to work when the knock off is the same looking, and acting, and is half the price. If you add features, then they can add them to.

    So how do you do it?

    --
    --- ...or a new slashdot signature. Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
  61. Knockoffs in the drug industry by flaterates · · Score: 1

    Generic drugs are knockoffs. Most money spent on R&D in the drug industry goes toward developing generic drugs. Something becomes a good seller and others copy it. That's where they make their big bucks. That's why new drugs are slow to be developed, the R&D budget goes toward duplication.

    1. Re:Knockoffs in the drug industry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bulk of expenses is for marketing. This includes direct marketing to consumers (TV ads), buying dinners to doctors, outright bribes to prescription drug managers.

      Let's not forget the army of lobbyists.

      Two minutes of googling claiming 2:1 ratio of marketing to R&D. I've seen 3:1 quoted more often.

      http://www.pnhp.org/news/2001/july/new_report_debu nks_d.php

      http://www.calicocat.com/2004/12/how-to-lower-cost -of-drugs.html

    2. Re:Knockoffs in the drug industry by BLKMGK · · Score: 1

      Generics are "knock-offs" legally made after a specific amount of time has expired in order to allow the originator time to recoupe their R&D investment. These are not simply products that were copied as soon as a new drug was made as you imply.

      --
      Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
  62. Re:Ooh! I smell blockbuster! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'd buy that for a dollar!

  63. Re:that depends on what is bootleged.... automobil by ShawnDoc · · Score: 1

    I don't know about cars, but "piracy" of motorcycles is really common, with many different companies competing to create the best quality bootleg. They basically buy the original motorcycle, and use the parts as the basis for new toolings to be produced in the chinese factories. Due to lack of technology, most copies are of motorcycles from the 1970's, however as China's mfg facilities improve they will be able to move up to more modern bikes.

  64. China will always copy by argoff · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Eventually China will crack down on the blatant piracy seen on its shores ....

    No it won't.
     
    1. Having IP strings attached to it by every country in the world is not in China's national best interest, having an duplicate manufacturing base is.
    2. Copying stuff freely is very deeply engrained in Asian culture, and that won't change in spite of western bigotry
    3. In spite of the self rightous bullshit and wining by people in the west. Copyrights and Patents have nothing to do with incentive, property, or free markets and have everything to do with using the brute force of government to preserve monopolies.

    Truth is, we are gonna get exactly what we have comming to us if we don't pull our head out

  65. Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I can't feel but slightly bitter that I submitted this same story a day ago and it was rejected, only to appear now by somebody else :). Oh well, life goes on!

  66. Re:that depends on what is bootleged.... automobil by alib001 · · Score: 1

    There's a huge market in counterfeit car parts (typically inferior quality products made to look like the original manufacturer's parts). Genuine car parts can be expensive (e.g. check the price for a headlamp cover on a new car etc.) so counterfeiting operations have become well-established in some countries. Not so good if the counterfeit part in question is vital to the safe operation of the vehicle and hasn't been properly tested or had to meet strict quality control standards.

    Fake car parts danger.

  67. Lux government did that during anti-softpat demos by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 1

    You wouldn't have to actually block the door, just blocking the view of the door from the street with something that looked like construction equipment would pretty much end the flow of people coming in.Actually, something similar happened during the anti-software patent demo before the Luxembourgish ministry of economy. As the demonstrators had all their papers in order, the ministry could not have them forcefully removed. So what did they do? They ordered a huge moving van, and parked it right in front of the demonstrator's huge banner (which was hard to move without tearing the paper, being nailed on a wooden framed anchored in cement blocks).

  68. Counterfeit semiconductors by Circlotron · · Score: 1

    My first hand experience occurred just a couple of weeks ago. I bought from a Chinese company one thousand 600 volt 70 amp IGBTs ostensibly made by International Rectifier, a well established and reputable company, for some stuff I am making at my little electronics manufacturing business at home for a customer of mine. I picked these parts up for what seemed like a good price but when I tried them out they just wouldn't behave properly. Eventually I cracked one open and the silicon die was only about 40% of the size of a known good one. Except for having numerous scratches indicative of poor handling, they look just like the real thing. I haven't got an ice-cube's hope in hell of getting my money back and there's really nothing I can do except chuck them in the bin and put it down to experience. Oh, wait on, the bin is already full of the 400 Chinese sourced eproms I already put there, the ones that say ST on the outside but identify as TI and yet look like neither and have an access time of something worse than one =microsecond=... You read about how China has absolutely massive pollution problems from all the industry there. You know what? I really don't care at all. Not one bit.

  69. DRM and defective by design helps them. by bogado · · Score: 1

    All I know is that I want to buy a MP3 player and I will not get anywhere near an I-POD or a zune, in fact I'm not risking buying something from other somewhat larger competitors like creative labs or any other player that is know by their trademark, I will search for a cheap no-name "ching-ling" (how we call those Chinese knock offs). They will not have any DRM stuff, simply because they don't need to get in bed with Americans *iaa and they are more interested in sell to me the customer.

    It is sad, because I got to a point that I do not trust "brand-names". Brand-names appeared to assure that something had a specific origin and quality, before them there was no way to know where the products came, but I don't know exactly when they started to be more important then the product it self, so now when you buy a shoe, a shirt or a apple or dell computer you get the same thing for a more expensive price.

    --
    []'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins

    ^[:wq

  70. Re:Lux government did that during anti-softpat dem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Haha the bastards!

    If it was left there overnight, I'd have painted a pro-patent message on the side of the van. They'd never be able to convince the court that it wasn't their message, and have to pay for removing the paint/repainting the van.

    Hell, paint it on the side facing the banner, nobody else would see the message or see you painting it ;)

  71. How about iPods? Chinese iPods! by retrosteve · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A chinese friend recently showed me his "iPod nano" knockoff from China.

    It was the same size and shape and weight as a nano, but made with obviously cheaper materials. The clickwheel was replaced with a similar-looking clunky clicker. The front, normally logoless, was blazoned with a tacky ripoff Apple logo and the word "iPod" in cheap decal. The color screen was about double the size though.

    BUT: The software was cooler. The UI design was all-new, and much flashier than Apple's, and ran in many languages including Chinese and variants. The features included FM radio, video (the screen was bigger and brighter than a real nano's), and audio record/playback.

    The connectors were not Apple-style, there was just a USB connection and a micro-phono jack.

    The whole tacky package was available, he assured me, in China for about $40. So who would buy the real one?

  72. Then you know nothing about real products by Ogemaniac · · Score: 1

    It takes many man-years of effort to develop a new plastic, and there is often a lag time of a year or more between the first customer samples and the first major sales. If your customers are allowed to reverse-engineer your products without penalty, by the time they test and decide upon the variation that they like best, and you figure out how to scale it, it would be already too late. It is regularly a process of 3-5 years from patent to commercial-scale product.

    1. Re:Then you know nothing about real products by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1

      A new type of plastic is not at all what I was talking about when I said a "new style of cell phone". You also are contradicting yourself. If it takes 3-5 years from patent to product, then it's going to take at least that long for your competitors too. And that's from the time they get the details of the patent, which will be closer to the product release time if you don't let the customer samples leak. You've gotta be pretty incompetent to let your competitor to get a product out before you. That's not to say it won't happen, but there's no need to reward such incompetency.

  73. All or nothing? by Mateo_LeFou · · Score: 1

    "Right, because there's no tech company in the world that actually innovates"

    Did GP say 100% of the feats in engineering or "the finest feats" ... I'm too lazy to look. Are you?

    --
    My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
  74. Re:that depends on what is bootleged.... automobil by johnpaul191 · · Score: 1

    that i understand. it read as though there were fully complete bootleg cars on some secret showroom.

  75. Re:that depends on what is bootleged.... automobil by johnpaul191 · · Score: 1

    whoa! where can i get one! 1970s Japanese motorcycles are among my favorites. i wonder if a new 2006 bootleg is any more dangerous on the highway than a 30 year old bike that i found on craigslist for $300?

    ok, seems like a bad idea. but....... hmmmm.......

    doesn't China make some of the bikes for some of the Japanese bike companies now? if so they will have the technology in place (to some degree) to make current bikes. as those plants upgrade, that older equipment is going to be used to make *something*. i know there are Korean motorcycles that are supposed to be in the US, or coming soon. same thing, they spent years making bikes for Honda etc and there are plants that have the technology and skilled workers in place. at some point the ultra efficient Honda people will upgrade their gear, so the old stuff will probably be sold off. the initial reviews i read of the US versions of Korean motorcycles seemed promising. they were not up to grade with the top of the line Japanese race bikes, but they were deemed a good buy for their price.

  76. Before us? Yeah, that would be incompetent by Ogemaniac · · Score: 1

    But a year or so later? That could happen quite easily if the law didn't prevent it. We could not possibly recoup the development costs in one year.

  77. Re:Before us? Yeah, that would be incompetent by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1

    You wouldn't have to recoup all your development costs within a year, you'd just have to improve the product or production line so that it was better or more efficient than someone who is a year behind. That's not much to ask for, and if you can't do it then you deserve to be out of business.

  78. Really? by Ogemaniac · · Score: 1

    I do not know of anyone who plans products for one year life cycles, and I work in the semiconductor industry, one of the fastest around. Rather, our products should be bleeding edge for a couple of years, and continue to provide robust revenue for a decade or more when they are no longer at the forefront, but used in non-critical layers. In any case, the sales in our FIRST year are often nil or trivially small.

    1. Re:Really? by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1

      You completely misread my post. I explicitly said that you do not need to make your money back in one year. Rather, I said that within a year the product should either be improved or you should be able to make it cheaper than someone who has to start from scratch. In reality it should be both.

      In any case, yes, companies which can rely on copyrights, and to a lesser extent patents, tend to be much more lazy than they would be if they had to keep innovating instead of just coming up with an idea and watching the money pour in "for a decade or more" without doing any additional work.