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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."
I knew a fellow that was an engineer working for Siemens in China on HSR and he had some wonderful stories about how their computers grew legs while working in China.
Apparently, from what I remember, the Siemens folks would return to work in the morning and all of the computer cables (monitor, keyboard, power, etc...) would be disconnected from the machines. Sometimes the computers would just pile into a group inside the office. They changed the locks to the office, locked down cpus, etc... but without fail the machines just moved on their own. Unable to get any useful response from their Chinese contacts they set up a camera and found it was the folks they were working on the project with who were taking the computers. When confronted with the evidence, the response was a merely 'Not Us!' And business continued as if none of this was happening.
To continue this point, SOP with China especially, and Asia in general, is to surrender IP via technology transfer agreements and consulting agreements. This is bad philosophically, but necessary practically as a business can get something for teaching and training, or nothing at all. Either way, you will have your IP stolen so most shops have decided to get what they can while they can. This was all tolerable before, but now that China is competing in primary markets with effectively stolen technology lots of industries are getting pissed, not just train builders.
The whole point behind patents is to encourage innovation by granting an inventor time-limited monopolies on their ideas so long as they teach their invention to the world. Using trains as en example, Siemens figures out how to build a better flim-flam widget inside the boffin-tube to make the ding-dang wheel spin faster... which somehow improves the Train. By agreeing to tell the world how it all works, they are allowed to prevent others from selling this thing to the world for a two decades. The idea being, Alstom researchers can use that knowledge to make an even smaller flim-flam that leads to an even better train.
What China is encouraging is businesses to no longer patent certain processes and methods, instead opting for the trade-secret route. While the /. population in general probably feels less patents are good, it isn't. Instead of teaching the world about flim-flams and boffin-tubes, Alstrom and Siemens will lock up their technology inside a vault as "Trade Secrets", jealously guard it from outsiders and even insiders who don't need to know. Innovations stumbles and we all suffer as a whole.