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China In the Habit of Copying and Redirecting US Sites?
Want to know why US web companies have trouble making it in China? gaz_hayes passed us a link to the blog commiepod, which suggests that successful US websites are targeted by 'Chinese government backed companies.' "These companies copy the site, deploy it on a .cn domain, and then DNS poison or forcefully lower the bandwidth the US site. Just a few weeks ago google.com and google.cn were DNS poisoned across the entire Chinese internet and were being redirected to their Chinese competitor Baidu. This probably explains Google's 3rd quarter market share in China." This is a fairly serious accusation; anyone else have first-hand experiences that would back this up?
Excerpt:
Table-ized A.I.
In the Chinese net culture, full-text being copied and pasted is a compliment, showing popularity of the work. You always find the work of popular online novelists "mirrored" on multiple websites. People usually acknowledge the author but does not always provide a URL reference. Plagiarism, or more specifically, defrauding the reader of authorship of the work, usually isn't the motivation.
This copy and paste culture can be traced to two historical reasons: (1) before printing press was invented, literature was only distributed by unregulated hand-copying. This is what student used to do in school. By the time you finished school, you would have copied a number of literature works by hand. And (2), private, unregulated hand-copying is the only way literature can survive over several oppressive emperors.
The former practice can still be seen prevalent in many CJK education system nowadays, where students are asked to manually copy some text on a regular basis as a part of the learning process. The latter reason still applies today as well; you'd see full-text of an article posted on an online BBS forum only to be taken down later by the authority, and someone posts the full-text again on another BBS forum.
In addition, copyright and authorship are separate issues. Interestingly, the British first invented copyright in order to allow the royalty to regulate printing of books (i.e. for censorship). Copyright granted the print shop a license to print a work. Without a license it would be illegal. Copyright was not invented to protect authorship.
In conclusion, it is not that the Chinese does not respect authorship. Copyright is simply unsuitable under the historical and cultural context. This seems to chime with the notion that real man upload his code on FTP and let everyone else mirror it, as said by some Linus dude.
I once had a signature.
Welcome to globalisation, America. It's a good thing, remember? Petty national interests, including your petty national interests, need to become a thing of the past. And the view that shipping is a strategic resource and communication is not is bizarre beyond belief, moreso in a democracy such as you supposedly inhabit.
Then, and if it ever came to that, I think that's ultimately why you have an army. Defending your own ports is certainly a better use for it than, say, overthrowing foreign governments because you think you can embarrass the French by showing the world that they are as moronically unethical in their arms sales as you are, when actually they aren't....
Yeah, yeah, it's a troll... but I am so tired of this doctrine that freedom of movement, freedom of trade, the rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech and the right to a good cup of coffee are to be the goals of the entire world, but only in so far as they inure solely to the benefit of the USA.
As far as I can tell from non-US, non-Chinese news sources, the Chinese are presently trying at least as hard as the US to put their house in order. Their priorities may be different from yours, but yours are different from theirs, right? When CNN is a better news source than the Daily Show, maybe we can talk about Chinese information policy. When American corporations stop bullying foreign governments, we can talk about how foreign governments should be nicer to American corporations.
...And to those many readers who are American and not insane, look, I apologise for frothing at the mouth. I know it's worse for you than it is for me.