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China Becoming Intellectual Property Powerhouse
eldavojohn writes "A lot of Westerners view China as little more than the world's factory manufacturing anything with little regard to patents, copyrights and trademarks. But it seems as far as patents go, China is moving on up. According to the WIPO, the company that applied for the most patents in 2008 was not an American or Japanese company but China's Huawei Technologies. And China has made astonishing ground recently moving up to third place with 203,257 patent applications behind Japan (500,000) and the United States (390,000). It remains to be seen if these patents applications will come to fruition for China but it is evident that they are focusing on a new image as a leader in research and development. The Korean article concentrates on 2008 but you can find 2009 statistics at the WIPO's report on China along with some statistics breaking down applications by industry."
I remember back when outsourcing and offshorting really started to ramp up and the whole mentality was, "The U.S. will become a nation of intellectual property holders and high-level managers while the rest of the world does the grunt work".
China is known for making knock-offs and stealing intellectual property. If China controls the majority of manufacturing and "grunt" work, then they ultimately have complete access to everything and nothing will really stop them from yanking the rug out from under the idiot outsourcers who didn't see it coming and assumed they could maintain all the power and wealth without doing any of the real work.
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The first time around, it was the United States that started as a stealer of inventions from other countries, then over time became far more interested in protecting intellectual rights. When your own industry isn't generating the ideas, you figure anyone's ideas are fair game; when your industry is coming up with new ideas, you want to protect your position.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
How is that different from the good ole US of A?
The mighty US publishing industry was built on infringing (or stealing, or whatever) the copyrights of European authors for so many decades it may be close to a century or two.
Then, the markets grew and Hollywood developed a solid relationship with Washington during WWII doing propaganda shit. The studios and the publishing companies started making money off American productions.
And suddenly - lo and behold - the US government changed its mind on the matter, joined the various copyright conventions and went on to become the world champion of copyright and related rights.
You're seeing China doing exactly the same thing, only 80 years later, using (and perhaps abusing) the very framework US put in place.
You may laugh but America did the exact same thing when they were industrializing, many European companies complained about American companies ignoring copyright and patents. It was only after the US started inventing their own unique designs that they started enforcing IP rights. China has reached that same stage were they are now producing their own unique products so you will see IP right enforced more rigidly. If this is a good or bad thing time will tell, for Europe it didnt work out well as many industries collapsed as more innovative products came out of the USA.
> China's Huawei Technologies
Would that be the same Huawei Technologies that stole Cisco IOS code and who's rep was caught photographing chipboards of Cisco gear in the Cisco booth after hours?
I agree. Last I heard, they only enforced IP rights when non-Chinese companies infringed (or appeared to infringe) upon a Chinese company's IP.
Anyone know if China's still doing that? (with references)
Where are your references that they actually did that?
On a side note, several years back I attended a speech by David Martin, who is founder/CEO of the company M-CAM, which is specialised in evaluating patent portfolios (such as determining how many claims overlap with other patents, likely validity etc). It was so interesting that I transcribed it. That page also contains the audio recording.
One of the things he mentioned is that China has a requirement that whenever the state purchases technology from a foreign interest, all "IP" for enabling technologies and know-how must be transferred as well. Many Western companies figured the Chinese wouldn't know/comprehend the exact patent rights they gave to the Chinese, so they only transferred rights to second-rate patents that weren't worth the paper they weren't printed on (crappy patents don't only exist in the software world). Once the Chinese caught up with this practice,
It's easy to accuse the Chinese of "stealing" everything, but (just making up these numbers) what if 48% of what's supposedly stolen should actually have been transferred to them in the first place according to contractual obligations (nobody ever forced those companies to do business there if they didn't like the terms), 48% consists of bogus patents and the other 2% is simply the equivalent of the Nokia/Apple/Google/Microsoft/HTC/LG/... patent infringement lawsuits that you have in the US mobile industry (are all those companies "thieves", copycats etc)?
I also think the "Probably stolen?" subject of this thread shows incredible ignorance. China probably has more engineering majors graduating every year than any other country in the world. Do you honestly think that the Chinese for some reason are inherently more stupid than us Westerners and cannot come up with anything innovative? Especially "innovative according to patent office standards"?
As far as I can tell, they've simply learned the tricks of the trade. For decades, "intellectual property" allowed us to have the best of both worlds: cheap labor from China and nevertheless preventing them from making cheap knock-offs and importing those back into our territories (they could sell them over there, but nobody cared about that since nobody had any money so there was no real profit to be made anyway).
Now they are starting to beat us at our own idiotic game. And still some people think they have the moral high ground and yell "but they steal everything from us, this cannot be". Wake up.
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A really bad ugly un-fixable mess.
As bad and ugly as it would be, the chinese are already there.
China's investment in Africa has grown by as much as 30% annually, faster than in any other continent, from $1.6-billion in 2008 to $5.4-billion in 2009. About 2000 Chinese companies are engaged in 8000 projects in Africa, mainly in infrastructure and agriculture.
And here you have some other numbers: "Beijing says its trade with Africa is on track to top $US100 billion ($A103.5 billion) this year" (this year means less than 3 months now, isn't it?)
To put the things in perspective: in July 2009, US owed China 900+ billion (without counting the trade deficit with China) - 10% of money that US owes China will go into Africa in less than 3 month!?!
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