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Chinese President Vows To Boost Intellectual Property Protection (afr.com)
hackingbear writes: In the opening of China's first import-themed trade fair, President Xi Jinping promised tougher penalties for intellectual property theft, a key concern of the Trump administration, in front of leaders and executives from 3,600 companies from more than 170 countries. China has been steadily advancing intellectual property protection over the years. In addition to filing twice as many patents as the U.S. in 2017, up nearly 14 folds from 2001, it is also increasingly being selected as a key venue for patent litigation by non-Chinese companies, as litigants feel they are treated fairly as foreign plaintiffs won the majority of their patent cases in 2015 (though that likely attracts patent trolls). China's journey from piracy to protection models the journeys of the U.S. which had blatantly violated intellectual properties in building its modern industry.
"The way I see it, now they have stolen all their technology they want to protect future advancements they make with it."
Yes, exactly the same way the US developed itself after stealing european tech back when they were the pirates.
Clearly not even LEGO thinks this since there are several other systems of building block toys out there and readily available. The clue was the use of the term "bootleg product"; that basically implies a knock-off that either pretends to be the official product or is an obvious clone of it. In this specific case it's a rip-off of LEGO's product, right down to replacing the LEGO logo with their own "Lepin" version and replication of the Mini-Fig form, as can be seen in this article. You can quibble over "IP" in the context of imaginary property, but LEGO's case was on the grounds of registered trademark infringment which isn't doesn't get much more black and white than that.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
China?
Boost intellectual property protection?
*inhales deeply*
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Nothing is changing here, it's just words. The idea here is to fool Xi's US counterpart.
No it's not to fool the US counterpart, it's to fool all of the countries and companies that do business in China. Why do you ask? Well for the first time the politburo has stated that "yes they are actually worried about the tariffs, but also countries moving out of china and back to their home countries." Topping this out with the anti-chinese sentiment allowing them to buy up resources/land/etc in other countries for their own use.
The second part, is they've just had 9 repeat quarters of GDP dropoff, and in order to stave off negative GDP growth they want to pump in more debt to bolster it. Problem is, they're burning on empty. They have nearly 1000 large cities that have next to no population and nobody can buy into them. They have hundreds of cities modeled after Canadian and US housing developments...but nobody is buying them. Can't even rent them. They sit there...empty. But all those companies have debts for pay, resources, etc that are starting to come due and there's been a big spike in business failures and asset forfeitures. Now the really interesting thing, banks have been lending on assets(resources, stockpiles, buildings, etc). Then finding out that 3 other banks have done the same, and those assets don't exist.
Ready for the real shitshow to start? If you are, let the tariffs keep going. Japan, Korea, Philippines, Singapore will cheer China hitting serious financial problems.
Om, nomnomnom...
I live in Hong Kong and work in Mainland China from time to time. This argument is made all the time (that the US has contradictory policies, and China is only doing what everyone else has done).
The major flaw with this argument is that it attempts to draw a moral equivalence over 100+ years of human history. For example, does it make sense to exercise criminal justice today the same way we did in the late 1800s? Most would consider that an absurd question. For some reason with IP people tend to not exercise that train of thought.
Intellectual property was not protected anywhere in the world 100 years ago, when the US and European nations were industrializing. A couple of additional key points that differentiate what China is doing from what the US did:
- Everyone was stealing from each other in the late 1800s as IP wasn't protected and nations were industrializing concurrently (e.g., the UK stole textile technology from the Italians, and the US stole from the UK).
- The US never rewrote history to claim they were the original investors of (most) stolen IP. Google The Chinese have brainwashed the average citizen who now walks around with the audacity to tell the world that they invented high-speed rail after standing on decades of research and development from the Germans and the Japanese (the French had the foresight to stay away).
The part in bold is simply not true:
https://www.txpatentattorney.com/blog/the-history-of-intellectual-property/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History
The US has claimed plenty of inventions as their own when they were not, a cursory google search will tell you that (btw the first search engine was created by a Canadian).