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China Defends Its IP Practices, Says 'We Paid Up'
hackingbear writes "Countering accusations that China's high-speed rail technologies are knockoffs, the head of China's Intellectual Property Administration in a conference said (paraphrasing): "We bought technologies from German, Japan, France, and Canada. We paid up. It is perfectly legal. We then innovate on top of them like most other inventions in the world. Why is that pirating?' (Link is to a Google translation; here is the original.) He cited China's ability, the world's first, to build high-speed rail in a high mountain area as an example of additional innovation."
When the deal regarding the Transrapid was announced in Germany most people didn't take notice that the deal involved China wanting to eventually build the trains themselves which of course means licensing the technology and transferring a lot of know-how. So people who now accuse China of stealing obviously didn't pay attention back then because at least to me and a few of my friends it was immediately obvious that eventually we would get cut out of the picture. So what, we've got the Transrapid for over 20 years now and all we have in Germany is a test course. In Shanghai, at least it's really transporting people even if in the long run it won't be our technology any more. Better than not making use of it at all.
you own the means of production in a limited and short term fashion. pretty soon, your claim and your basis for ownership evaporate
if you own the factory, you actually own the means of production, and therefore you actually are in power
the usa has moved all of its production to china, retaining the intellectual property "keys". these keys will rapidly become useless and unenforceable, and all the purple faced tirades about piracy will be met with a shrug. and the usa will find itself locked out of those factories, and without power
the pursuit of profit has resulted in a very short sighted situation where all the means of production are being moved to an autocracy that does not share our values. it will take a number of years, but this will not end well. and it is all because the captains of industry want fractionally higher stock market returns, and joe six pack wants more cheap plastic crap at walmart. for these empty goals, the common man and the man in power in the usa are selling their country's soul
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
ANY girl in a remote area is desperate.
No need to visit China - just to Appalachia (like west virginia).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I'm sure China has done just as much innovation on those rails as the Soviets did with the Tu-4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4)
We could also cite how USA and Russia innovated rocket technology, thanks to the Germans. I am not saying this is any better or worse, what I am saying is that if you comb through history then you will probably see many more cases of technology ending up in other countries without some sort of 'due' being paid. While it is only fair to compensate the original inventor or innovator, there are limits to doing so.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It's an English translation made by the Chinese government of a press release put out by...the Chinese government. Why would the English translation be any more or less suspect than the original Chinese document? It's not like there aren't any bilingual Chinese/English speakers out there who could translate it independently, so there would be no purpose to making the text different in any meaningful way.
Also, calling China a "tin-pot dictatorship" is silly. A tin-pot dictator is one who, despite delusions of grandeur, is ultimately of little significance to the world at large. However you might choose to characterize China, "of little significance to the world at large" it is not.
Just a question, if "four years later you are competing with your own technology plus Chinese improvements", then why haven't you improved it yourself just as well or better? If during those four years, the Chinese improvements are so advanced that you can't compete, then it's your own fault, not "lax Chinese labor and pollution".
Okay with this sort of logic, you're not going to see any company willing to invest into R&D more than four years of return from that innovation.
It's fine if you want to draw the line at four years or four decades or four days, I don't care. But you have to realize that this will severely affect R&D if it's your own fault that you failed to improve past what you just innovated. Justifying someone using your patents to directly compete with you is only unfair when you were granted those patents assuming a longer time to recoup the money you invested into those patents.
I'm not arguing for or against patents and I'm not arguing to lengthen or shorten the time they are in effect. What I'm trying to do is get you to understand the repercussions of doing any of the above.
Corruption, lax pollution laws and questionable labor practices make China very difficult to compete with. We've exported so much manufacturing there because of this. Is it a bad thing? Only when you're a company that's facing brutal competition because you engaged in "technology transfer." If you're telling those companies it's "their fault" for not out-innovating the Chinese, I would argue that the Chinese could pay someone 1/10 to manufacture the technology and bribe a local official to ignore that excess acidic precipitate from the mine making the rail and come out underbidding you on any contract the world over. Regardless of whether they improved on your design or not.
In my opinion, pure unbridled capitalism is a very devastating force and responsible IP laws are a good thing. IP infringement is Chinese culture. They play by their rules and if you're not prepared for it, do not engage in business with them.
My work here is dung.
Oh, and I forgot:
3.China's population density is many times that in the USA. Most people in China live in the strip of land along the coastline and there are 1,600,000,000 of them. The subway in Beijing for example runs 6 car trains every 2 minutes during rush hour and it is standing room only. The light rail here in Denver is a 3 car train every 15 minutes and you can usually sit. (yes, I've ridden both) One of these public transportation systems pays its own way on ticket sales and one of them is HEAVILY subsidized by taxpayers. Your guess which one is a sensible public mass transit system and which one exists mainly to make people feel good about some abstract idealized notion of public transportation.
I've noticed a tendency of most people to define ethics in a way that gives their own group an edge, and using that standard to measure everyone else's behavior. For example, black people 'steal' at a higher rate than white people, but white people actually steal vastly more wealth, they just do it through white collar tricks that they don't consider stealing. For example, they get money for R&D that never pans out, and which they could have known from the outset would never pan out, but they didn't ask the relevant questions because they didn't want to endanger the flow of money. Then they pretend that's just how R&D is. Or, the let their money "work for them" in the stock market, and pretend that they deserve high returns because their money is making the economy more efficient. They ignore the dynamics where they're getting richer because someone else in a less advantageous position is seeing their savings evaporate through inflationary effects that they can't protect themselves against.
So yes, Chinese people are dishonest, and have some other traits that are even worse, as well as virtues that compare favorably to Europeans. But in the graduate school I went to, all the Americans except myself were cheating, and professionally most of the Americans I've worked with have effectively been stealing. So I'm tired of hearing how corrupt other peoples are when our own culture is destroying itself. We are the reason our economy has been going down the shithole, its not the immigrants.