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China's Official Newspaper Pans iPad — Too Locked Down
An anonymous reader writes "The People's Daily newspaper, which is the official news organ of the ruling Communist party in China, apparently recently posted a review of the iPad, where it complained about the locked down nature of the device, noting that 'There are many disadvantages. For example you cannot install pirate software on them, you cannot download [free] music, and you need to pay for movies you watch on them.' You would think a country that is in favor of locking down the internet so much would like a locked up device ..."
If you drew up one of those 2x2 matrices favored by MBA consultants, Apple would be in the "locked down, good taste" cell. China would also be in the lockdown side of the "Freedom" axis, but would be opposite Apple on the "Style" axis.
Aren't iPads made at Foxconn? Maybe China should stop making these locked down products. Just sayin'.
Ok, so the Slashdot post links to Tech Dirt ad Tech Dirt links to Christian Science Monitor and Christian Science Monitor fails to link to the original article.
Anybody have a link to the ACTUAL article in the People's Daily? I want to see how badly those snippets were taken out of context, or if they are the result of glorified translation from the original Chinese.
~A~
The answer is that China is not America, and they don't believe the same things we do. Sometimes it's because they are wrong, and sometimes it's because we are wrong (for some value of wrong, of course). In this case it's quite interesting how differently they see it--they see the iPad as bad because they don't have any social norm at all in favor of copyright maximalism. To them, copyright maximalism is a bug to be worked around. It's kind of cool. I wish we (our culture) hadn't drunk that kool-aid. This is completely orthogonal to the great firewall (which, by the way, many members of the Communist party consider illegal).
You're right that Baidu probably beat Google by offering free searches for piracy sites. If you stop with the copyright maximalist viewpoint for a minute, that's exactly what you'd expect in a free-market situation. Baidu is better than Google, because it returns more useful results. This is only bad if you are a copyright maximalist, which most Chinese people are not.
Anyway, I'm not about to move to China--there are a lot of disadvantages to living there, particularly if you aren't Chinese. But I think it's worth thinking about this from a free market perspective, and not from the perspective of a system of law that is really not very widely accepted.
Sounds like China to me. When I went there, I was curious to see if one could find NON-pirated DVDs for purchase. Never saw one. All DVDs and CDs in the city I was were pirated.
They were all really cheap too. I think it was 10 CDs for $5 and 3 DVDs for $8 if I recall correctly.
A country?
My first thought was "so what? What says the writer of the article agrees with the leaders of the country in general?", but then I saw that it was the paper of the communist party. And yeah, those are probably the people who want to lock down the Internet. Not "the country."
Though I do understand it was mostly written to be funny and may not correlate much.
Intellectual Property is an illusion. You can't claim ownership over ideas no matter how many laws you make. People are always going to take someone else's Idea, change it, use it, make it better, what ever, get over it.
The real ecnomic future is when we stop claiming ownership over stupid things like ideas and in some cases expression of ideas and let the community work out the best way to make it work. You don't have a god given right to make money off of something you do, the people decide when, where and why you get to make that money. The internet is transforming the way we think about this and you better get on board before you get your ass left behind. Its as simple as that.
Nope, I have friends in China who have good jobs and enough money to pay for movies. They're completely unembarrassed about pirating movies. They don't consider it wrong in any sense. They're a lot like us before we became a rich country--Charles Dickens used to be brutally pirated by American publishers, and couldn't do a thing about it.
The company I work for doesn't have any trouble getting money from Chinese companies for our software product. The reason is that we offer service along with the software. Maybe your statement is true with respect to some part of the Chinese government--I don't know. But it's pretty clear that at least with respect to the companies we're dealing with, what's going on here is a difference in culture, not some concerted attempt to harm American businesses.
From my perspective as a software developer, it seems to me that what's harming American businesses is copyright and patent maximalism, not some effort on China's part to harm us. I'm much more personally worried about American patent trolls than I am about Chinese software pirates. Indeed, I'm not at all worried about Chinese software pirates.
But to bitch about it without recognizing the historical precedent we set here in the US is being disingenuous. For a very long time we ignore European copyright (Dickens was angry about this) and the Industrial Revolution being kicked off in Pawtucket, Rhode Island by Mr. Slater was a feat of "intellectual property theft" and he was a hero for it.
I can get as mad as I want at China, but once I step back a second, I can understand the motivations.
We taught them well.
--
BMO
Footnotes:
Slater's Mill: http://www.slatermill.org/
Dickens and Copyright: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva75.html
This is also how Rome became the superpower of its time. They absorbed popular religions and trends from their newly-attached regions -- the Greek pantheon was adopted with suitable localization in Rome, for example. And later Christianity, with the Pope twist added for control.
The Chinese have done their homework...
I think I've noticed an accompanying trend: people who know jack-shit about China tend to be the most vociferous about it. Not only are they, as you observe, fashionably hating on China, they also have suddenly all become experts.
I think the same trend applies to Islam as well. I can't count the number of times I've had people lecture me that "Muslims believe this, Muslims believe that..." who've never met a Muslim. If I go "Oh really? That hasn't been my experience," I'm told that it's in the Qur'an so it must be true. These are people who have definitely never picked up a Qur'an in their lives. Invariably it's people who want to convince me Muslims are a threat. Invariably it doesn't work because I know history and can think critically, but that doesn't stop them from trying.
It was especially funny when a tea-partier was recently trying to convince me that I would have no rights in China where all my property and my wife would be stolen, and that Muslims all want to murder infidels because the Qur'an says so. It didn't help to point out that I'd been to China twice and none of those bad things had happened to me, or that the Christian Bible also has passages instructing believers to kill infidels which, taken out of context, would be just as scary as the ones he'd taken out of context from the Qur'an. He just insisted that he's Catholic and Catholics don't kill people for their beliefs. The great irony is that I'm a Unitarian, and historically far more Unitarians have been killed for being infidels by Catholics than by any other faith. But apparently I'm supposed to believe I have more to fear from Muslims than from Catholics, because this expert told me so.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009