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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.
They may have IP, but do they have TCP or UDP yet?
As someone who lives in China and works with western companies that manufacture goods here, I can tell you that the stereotype of copying and low-quality goods is 100% true. Although the article does have nuggets of truth (it was in Beijing's 5-year plan was to patent as many things as they could, then raise the quality of those patents), I wouldn't call China an innovation powerhouse just yet. They have tainted their image and reputation with their antics over the last couple of decades.
America's strength is in innovation and it will always be. When most of us think of innovation here on /. we think of tech (e.g., Tesla, Facebook, Google, etc). But innovation is much broader than that. For example, why does China not see any innovation in the pharmaceutical space? Where are those bleeding edge drugs for HIV, hepatitis C, fibromyalgia? I think you'll see a lot of tech innovation in China because that is largely what they have been exposed to in the last few decades
I agree with your statement that they are as smart as all of us... a large number of highly educated mainland Chinese were in fact educated in the west, including top US universities. It's hard to have respect for the kid who copies your homework, regardless of their intelligence or ability. The defense to this is quite often "every country that ever got rich copied, including the US". True, the US copied Britain, who copied Italy (textiles) and so on. That was 100 years ago, how we regarded and saw IP and hence the law was different. Everyone in the west copied each other, but everyone innovated at the same time. Hence the "revolution" in the Industrial Revolution. I'm sorry that China missed out on that because it was too busy being insular, but it can't leverage unfair competition to catch up.
In 2013 China created a 3-region IP court system to begin enforcement. The law however lags far behind -- for instance, it is virtually impossible to discover an infringing product as there is no legal avenue for this -- you have to illegally plant an investigator inside a factory to catch people in the act. Alternatively, you have to get an official to witness you purchasing an infringing product from the source (which is ridiculous). Meanwhile, they defend local companies that sue the crap out of western companies. They've gotten to the point where they are ready to start pushing their products and services outside of China, so it's not surprising that they will do what suits them -- which is to get serious about IP enforcement. This is the stereotypical Chinese way of thinking in any legal dispute or the like --- there are no truths or ideologies -- you do what suits you and define things in a way that benefits you, even if you contradict yourself later. Sure, every country does this, but China take it to an extreme.
Educational reading:
https://hbr.org/2010/12/china-vs-the-world-whose-technology-is-it
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/security/chinas-new-rules-ask-tech-firms-to-hand-over-source-code
https://qz.com/771727/chinas-factories-in-shenzhen-can-copy-products-at-breakneck-speed-and-its-time-for-the-rest-of-the-world-to-get-over-it/
http://www.chinalawblog.com/2016/02/china-nnn-agreements.html
http://abovethelaw.com/2016/11/china-product-cloning-and-the-death-of-first-to-market/
http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/02/why-access-to-china-can-be-suicide-for-u-s-companies/
The made in China stuff is usually poor quality because that's what the importers are choosing to get manufactured and bring in - squeezing for the lowest price, while not having sufficient quality control, so naturally you get exactly what you are paying for.
China can make good quality stuff - and quality control can make sure it stays consistently good - but you have to pay more for good quality and that's just not what the importers are generally choosing to bring in.
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.
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.'"
"Intellectual Property" should be abolished; patents in particular are evil. Patents are one of the biggest reasons we in 2017 we have 'robbed of our Jetsons future'.
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.