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Chinese Pirates Copy iPhone, Make Improvements
An anonymous reader writes "Popular Science notes that manufacturers in China duplicate many well-know products. This includes the Apple iPhone, imitations of which are rolling off the assembly line already. That might actually be a good thing for some users, who might enjoy the user experience of China's own miniOne. 'It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn't. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers.' The cloned iPhone uses a Linux-based system. 'The cloners hire a team of between 20 and 40 engineers to begin decoding the circuit boards. At the same time, coders start to develop an operating system for the phone with a similar feature set. (The typical cloner either uses off-the-shelf code, writes something entirely new, or modifies a publicly available Linux-based system.)' Using the iPhone as an example, the PopSci site walks through the process of making imitation technology."
Not to mention the "uncluttered by regulations" part tends to result in highly unsafe products. The list goes on. Somehow, I don't equate "being able to make random knockoffs but cannot do anything without governments approval" to be "true capitalism"
The safety of products sold is a prime reason to use a retailer and not buy wholesale yourself. Will Amazon or CVS or Wal-Mart sell unsafe products? They add their profit overhead to cover their infrastructure, but also to insure against buying faulty or dangerous products. If a product is deemed dangerous, they'll remove it from the market. If they find a large number of dangerous products from a given source, say China, they may go so far as to test products themselves before releasing them to the market. A large retailer can do way more, way faster, than the FDA, USDA or other organizations can. See: Underwriters Laboratories.
As for regulations, China is definitely not a regulated economy as much as the US is. China's provinces ("States") have varying degrees of regulations, with the least regulated ones growing the fastest. Doug Casey says about Shanghai "The dozens of hotels that can compete with those in Bangkok are starting to draw not just businessmen, but tourists. They like the beaches, and the shopping in a tax and regulation-free environment is incredible."
I've visitd Beijing and Shanghai, and I can tell you that government is quickly backing off of entrepreneurs and the business market. The booms in growth are amazing, along with the freedom that even a non-citizen has in starting new businesses. The same can be said about Dubai, where I'd love to at least have residency because of the unlimited opportunity to grow and blossom a business.
Never underestimate the power of infinite cheap labor. My Dad was navigator for a squadron of Recon F-4s (RF-4s - sheep in wolf's clothing) that flew night missions in vietnam. Their job (occasionally) was to take pictures at night of the Ho Chi Mihn trail. The fighter/bombers would bomb the road during the day. The VC would literally drive trucks down the bombed-out road at night. They would have a crew with shovels in front and behind. One crew filled in the craters, the truck would driver over, one crew dug out the craters. If you flew over the next day, the road still looked "bombed out". Infinite cheap or free labor is a powerful thing.
meh
The iPhone is basically a box with a big touch screen. The iPhone design has so few distinguishing features that it's hard to see which parts of the design Apple could claim a trademark on. Furthermore, Apple wasn't even the first to ship such a phone, LG was.
"Piracy" means violating either copyrights or trademarks. So, if they put an Apple logo or some unique graphical design on the phone, that would be piracy. If they copied Apple code, that would be piracy. It seems unlikely that they did either.
They might run into some patents, but patent infringement isn't usually referred to as piracy. Furthermore, the only really novel functionality on the iPhone is multitouch (technology Apple didn't invent but bought), and I seriously doubt the clones even bothered with multitouch.
So, this kind of cloning is probably not piracy. And given the many limitations of the iPhone, this kind of cloning is a good thing for the consumer. Even if they were the same price, I'd want one of these Chinese phones because it sounds like a better phone to me.
It's basically decimated the local film industry - China should be a huge market, but basically it's ignored even by local filmmakers, who aim themselves at foreign audiences - hence all those lame Westernish Kung-Fu movies from Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. This is also true in Hong Kong, which has a history of excellence and two of the greatest directors in the world, Wong Kar Wai and Johnny To, who now rely on non-Chinese audiences or even have turned to making American movies.
Chinese manufacturers have to aim at the foreign market from day 1. Any successful product will be immediately copied by Chinese cut-rate manufacturers. It is economically infeasible to design a product for the Chinese market.
Imitations also are often of a much lower quality. Bootleg bottled water in Beijing was recently revealed to often be fake, using filtered Beijing tap water (you wouldn't want to drink it).
Local musicians aren't able to sell their CDs. Anything popular from local bands will be sold on the street for maybe fifty cents. There is basically no music scene in China, everything is bootlegged from Hong Kong or Taiwan or the US.
Goods in China are marginally cheaper, but it's at the expense of shoddy products that are often of a lower quality, and of a moribund IP development, and a lack of locally produced culture. There is no motivation to doing work or putting expense into research, if there's no economic reward - and there's no economic reward when your ideas are ripped off immediately.
I'd love to see all these people who are so opposed to IP restrictions actually consider their argument, rather than use it as their rationalization for why it's not stealing to download bootleg copies of "Transformers the Movie."
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Now, how does selling a counterfeit under someone else's name fit in to your view of capitalism?
Pure, unfettered greed from pure, unfettered competition. I guess all those laissez-faire capitalists forgot about China, huh? Doesn't work so well without the Man there to *gasp* regulate business!!! "But that's SOCIALISM!!" Oh noes!
Just because the quality *might* be shit won't stop people from buying cheaper a knock-off. Unregulated competition is the definition of pure capitalism as any Milton-loving Libertarian or Republican (Mitt Romney?) would tell you. Can't have your cake and eat it too, I suppose is the moral.
GP is right.
it had apple logos and names all over it! More and bigger than the real iPod
I found this the funniest thing when travelling in China; everyone is so 'new money' and totally insecure about having brand name stuff that all the logos are at least 4x the size as on the same US product. You never forget the first time you see a 4 inch long Alligator logo or the 3 inch tall Polo player on a guy's shirt...
If the US government were really interested in a competitive economy rather than merely protecting incumbent crony corporations, this Chinese competition would face even stiffer competition from American corporations knocking off stuff, too.
We could tell that the US government was interested in that competition, and not propping up incumbents with IP protectionism that only cripples American (and close economic allies like Western Europe and Japan) competition's chance to compete, if the IP controls like flimsy but unending patents and copyrights were discarded in favor of growth.
Not only would American competitors to these Chinese knockoffs benefit, but of course the consumers would benefit from the lower prices and innovations. Since consumers are most of the economy, along with the labor we sell to corporations, our economy would benefit.
Or, we can just let China eat our lunch, while we prohibit ourselves from fighting back.
--
make install -not war
I study literature, and at least in that realm copying was a two-way street. Dickens lost gobs of money to American editions of his work while Melville, Clemens, and others lost gobs to copying in England. There were no copyright agreements, so there was flagrant copying. In fact, our nations were at war with one another off and on during the nineteenth century. It might be best to not cry over spilt milk.
Besides, if there were nothing new nor interesting about the iPhone, why would the Chinese company worked so hard to make an almost exact copy of it?
Doc: No wonder this circuit failed. It says "Made in Japan".
Marty McFly: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
Doc: Unbelievable.
If you, as an American coder, are having your code license infringed upon by a Chinese company that you can't touch, I wonder if you could go after stores selling the device. They, too, are violating the law. You could probably get ahold of their inventory, if nothing else.
Apple may rue the day they decided to delay the iPhone in markets other then the USA. By the time they make it th Europe and Asia, those markets might already be saturated.
Have gnu, will travel.
Here's an interesting thought. Marx made extensive use of Kantian dialectics, in which you have the thesis battling the antithesis until the synthesis arose.
I've always wondered if Marx really thought that communism was the synthesis to the decadence of the bourgeoisie and the plight of the proletariat, or really recognized that it was a antithesis to capitalism and was merely promoting it to spur the development of a more amenable synthesis.