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The Surprising Rise of China As IP Powerhouse (techcrunch.com)
hackingbear quotes a report from TechCrunch: China is not only taking the spotlight in strong defense of global markets and free trade, filling a vacuum left by retreating Western capitalist democracies, China is quickly becoming a (if not the) global leader in intellectual property protection and enforcement. And there too, just as Western democracies (especially the United States) have grown increasingly skeptical of the value of intellectual property and have weakened protection and enforcement, China has been steadily advancing its own intellectual property system and the protected assets of its companies and citizens. In addition to filing twice as many patents as the U.S., China is increasingly being selected as a key venue for patent litigation between non-Chinese companies. Why? Litigants feel they are treated fairly. Reports indicated that in 2015, 65 foreign plaintiffs won all of their cases against other foreign companies before Beijing's IP court. And even foreign plaintiffs suing Chinese companies won about 81 percent of their patent cases, roughly the same as domestic Chinese plaintiffs. China's journey from piracy to protection models the journeys of other Western and Asian countries. While building its industrial economies, the U.S. and major European powers violated IP laws with no consideration. As reported by The Guardian, Doron Ben-Atar, a history professor at Fordham University, has noted that "U.S. and every major European state engaged in technology piracy and industrial espionage in the 18th and 19th century." It took Western economies a hundred or more years to change that behavior. China's mind-whipping change is happening over decades, not centuries.
This is quite an interesting development, but it also doesn't surprise me. The patent system in the USA has basically jumped the shark now. You can get patents on almost anything, no matter how obvious or ridiculous it might be, and the more money you can spend on an attorney who has no idea how anything works but can get a list of words past the USPTO, the more absurd the patents can be. The result is that the system is now stuffed full of rubbish patents that are either at risk of invalidation, contradictory, or so specific that they are trivial to walk around (but add to the body of 'prior art' that can be used to invalidate other patents). All you can really do with patents now is drag someone into court and waste a lot of money on litigation. Just look at the Apple/Samsung fiasco to see how this works from a company that put a lot of effort into protecting its big invention.
It seems like the Chinese are just playing the game as well and benefiting from their lower costs to do it much more effectively. Among those I know with engineering companies, almost everyone just patents as a defensive strategy to prevent patent trolls coming along and dragging them into court (the mutually assured destruction nature of aggressive patent litigation doesn't apply to these NPEs). In a way I welcome the break down of the system in this way. Eventually everything will be patented ten times, making it very hard for a troll to gain much traction against legitimate companies trying to do useful things.
Right, that must be why some Chinese store owners are open only to western visitors, they don't let Chinese people from their own country in because they know their shit will be copied before they know it, and there's nothing they can do about it.
Take this from someone who actually knows this.
They are as smart as all of us humans, and if they get a decent education, they are as capable of producing "IP" and of defending it in court.
Well, first question, are they getting a decent education? Our own education system is pretty well-laden with bullshit lies. What's theirs like? Since they have a more fascist society than we do, they probably have more of the sort of lies which are needed to maintain it.
Just wait and see.
We have been waiting, but China hasn't invented much in the last thousand years* and it produces a higher percentage of completely bogus scientific papers than any other nation. (Not a higher percentage of the total, but a higher percentage of their output.) So where is the evidence that the Chinese are capable of first-rate production of IP that people want to consume?
Sorry about not linking to the section, the anchor didn't actually work. Look at the list of modern Chinese inventions and you will further see that it is at least half bullshit. Shit like "Car fueled by charcoal" (wood gas is not a news flash) and "Hydrogen bicycle" (fuel cells are not a news flash and neither are electric bikes) is needed to pad out the few legitimate discoveries, whose importance I do not want to downplay. And then there's garbage like "Cure of a solid cancer: In 1956, Min Chiu Li, who was educated and worked in the USA after leaving China because of the communist takeover, and Roy Hertz" ... yeah, not Chinese. That's American. Thanks. Or "Passenger drone", that's a blatant lie. That was done by a hobbyist first, as usual, and not a Chinese one. "Radar-absorbing active stealth material" is another American invention. "Self-balancing scooter (hoverboard)" was not only invented by a hobbyist but uh, Segway? That's just a hoverboard with a handle to make it less likely to fucking break your neck.
So in short, the evidence strongly contradicts your position. It strongly suggests that a few exceptional outliers aside, the Chinese are only currently capable of imitating the hard work of others. It's the only thing they've been practicing as a culture for almost a thousand years. Fit in, keep your head down, be like everyone else or you're going to lose that head. Otherwise, China wouldn't have to pad out its list of accomplishments with lies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The author is the former president of the American Intellectual Property Law Association. It's a shill piece.
Defenders of IP? Seriously. Can you explain the rampant piracy.
Defenders of global markets and free trade? Can you say state run/controller businesses, slave labor and currency devaluation.
Sorry you can't be taken seriously when you ignore how China operates.
The ACM programming contest is an academic exercise. It measures the ability to implement high-quality solutions to well-specified problems, not innovation. And people participate in those contests often because their country doesn't give them enough outlets for their skills and creativity.
You know who does even better than China at the ACM programming contest? Russia. Does that make Russia a powerhouse of innovation in computer science? Of course not. It means Russia has a supply of smart kids with nothing better to do.