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China Announces Punishments For Intellectual-Property Theft (bloomberg.com)
China has announced an array of punishments that could restrict companies' access to borrowing and state-funding support over intellectual-property theft. The news comes after the G20 Summit in Argentina, where the Trump Administration agreed to hold off on tariff action for at least 90 days as they negotiate to resolve specific U.S. complaints. Bloomberg reports: China set out a total of 38 different punishments to be applied to IP violations, starting this month. The document, dated Nov. 21, was released Tuesday by the National Development and Reform Commission and signed by various government bodies, including the central bank and supreme court. China says violators would be banned from issuing bonds or other financing tools, and participating in government procurement. They would also be restricted from accessing government financial support, foreign trade, registering companies, auctioning land or trading properties. In addition, violators will be recorded on a list, and financial institutions will refer to that when lending or granting access to foreign exchange. Names will be posted on a government website. "This is an unprecedented regulation on IP violation in terms of the scope of the ministries and severity of the punishment," said Xu Xinming, a researcher at the Center for Intellectual Property Studies at China University of Political Science and Law. The newly announced punishments are "a security net of IP protection" targeting repeat offenders and other individuals who aren't in compliance with the law, he said.
will find some negative spin to this
China Announces Punishments For Intellectual-Property Theft
Yawn ... call me when they are enforcing this regardless of the nationality of the owner of the stolen IP. The way things are at the moment China benefits from rigorous patent enforcement in the west but Chinese companies enjoy considerable priority and get massive preferential treatment over foreign ones when it comes to patent enforcement on Chinese soil. There is no reason to believe IP enforcement will be any different.
They'll naturally start to care as they continue to industrialize and start developing IP of their own and some new countries that begin to occupy the position that China is in now start stealing that IP. In the meanwhile, there will be some public slaps on the wrist and a little bit of extra lip service, but you're not going to get complete reform overnight.
Because China now has the important intellectual property
IP is such a meaningless term.Most American patents or IP are NOT truely innovative or original, more likely evergreened or a twist on something else. China has a bunch of cheap lawyers and researchers who can quickly dig up prior enough art to invalidate whatever.
It may be a shock to Americans to read their so called IP laws can exclude obscure prior IP, if say the patent or example was in Chinese or Russian etc. Thus local enforcement is likely to be a wash.
If Trump wants to start a war, fake Certification and compliance marks are the soft underbelly, as well as dodgy self certification papers.Lead contamination in plumbing fittings, plastic flamability, food adulteration are all easy targets.
They never have. There is fake Chicom stuff everywhere in China, fake Apple stores, etc.
Corporatism != Free Market
Most Chinese people can't even pronounce "intellectual"! This smacks of white supremacy!
But the laws of unintended consequences apply here. And the billion Han typing the Intellectual Property of Shakespeare apply here. This may also see a lot more small time tech products disappear, as they were only feasible while the IP costs were low.
But, like everything else in politics, once a path is chosen you need to wait 4 to 12 years to understand the full benefits or consequences it causes, because they almost never appear overnight.
No country truly benefits from IP. All it is, especially the forever minus X days/minutes/seconds kind, the restriction of reuse without any benefit to society as a whole. The best argument those that support it can come up with is "It allows recoup of development costs." for an actual reason and "No-one else would do it otherwise" as a an excuse.
The problem with the former is most costs, especially in the patent arena, are paid for by public funds. For copyright, the costs are entirely based on the scope of the work and as such can be scaled down to fit within the budget, even in the case of live performances. For trademarks, these are completely optional, and only the ones people directly associate with your business are the ones that need and are worth defending. Today, many things are trademarked for stupid and or law enforcement overlap reasons.
The problem with the latter is development can be done by true artists / scientists with a passion for their work. Often by great sacrifice on their part. Necessity is also a valid counter to the latter. The excuse only holds water in complete isolation, and fails to take into account that there are people who would do something for reasons other than money / greed.
Finally IP doesn't take into account how nature works. The ability to copy and reuse information, i.e. intelligence, is baked into the universe at a very fundamental level. The only way that IP works is if you can get others to agree not to do something the universe gives them the ability to do by default, or if you can easily kill them if they do. That's the whole point of the saying "I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you." It's an acknowledgement of this universal fact that exists through out human history. The very fact that people base their prosperity entirely on imaginary property, only makes it easier to impoverish said people. Especially if they exist in competition with others.
Here's hoping the IP non-sense will end soon. We're all just wasting time and resources fighting a losing battle otherwise.
If the Chinese were genuinely serious about this, they would shut down (or blacklist/apply these new restrictions to) all the hundreds of factories producing bootlegs of everything from smartphones to LEGO bricks to golf clubs to handbags.
So, the Chinese government has laid out punishments to be meted out by the Chinese government. However, the real meat of the any punishment depends on who gets to determine guilt and mete out punishment. I assume that the Chinese government would reserve that right for themselves, as would any sovereign nation. If so, can we expect any change from the current situation? If the US government determines that Huawei is guilty of stealing IP, would the Chinese government even bother to consider any punishments, or would they bog down any investigation in bureaucratic maneuvering or assign blame to individual scapegoats instead of the accused Chinese companies.
"China announces bullshit PR, Trump idiots ecstatic for 36 hours! News at 11"
... are bragging about something that actually changed in the world as opposed to an announced policy/summit/meeting that is just hot air./p.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Intellectuals understand that the words they speak aren't properly, and can't be stolen via theft.
Here's hoping the IP non-sense will end soon. We're all just wasting time and resources fighting a losing battle otherwise.
Not holding my breath, you can try to convince us all day long that creating IP is a cost free exercise but it isn't. So instead of pontificating about how IP rights are the work of Satan and information yearns to be free, can you come up with any concrete proposals for a mechanism by which people can recoup the money they sank into IP creation? Something besides donations and collecting the imaginary goodwill dollars they get from all the people pirating their work? ... because at some point in some way, in a world where you are completely free to profit off of anybody else's IP without compensating them for it, the IP creator still has to pay the bills for it to be worthwhile for him/her to bother.
Your grandma may have told you: be careful what you wish for.
1. If the claim of Chinese intellectual property violation is not exaggerated and that it will be fixed soon, then that would give American companies more incentives to do more research and development in China, tapping low cost engineers and other college graduates, instead of hiring expensive U.S. engineers.
2. China already files more patents than any other countries. The natural trend would be that there will be more patent trolls suing everyone including American companies, just like those opening up offices in East Texas.
3. once China enforce harder, their hi-tech industry will only become more competitive.
Eventually what happened was that, as China’s domestic copyright industries found themselves competing with cheap knock-offs of foreign goods, they pressed the Chinese government to fortify the IP enforcement process on its own. (To put this in perspective, this is also what happened a century earlier in the US, which until 1890 failed to protect foreign works, and then waited yet another century before joining the major international copyright treaty.)
China also has relatively strong environmental protections. However, they are only selectively enforced (against those the CCP doesn't like, or those who don't pay the accepted bribes).
Until China fixes its corruption problems in a serious way (and no, Xi's anti-corruption program is not a serious attempt, but rather just a purge of those who don't like him or challenge his power) anything China says must be taken with a grain of tariffed salt.
if tech company workers not steal enough US IP.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Screw Trump. I'm not a Hillary fanboy either though. Politicians need to die. This entire thing was over IP? Give me a break. The IP industry is an evil piece of shit. We need to abolish copyright not force it onto others. In the process of getting this done Trump has managed to undermine my small business by increasing the cost of parts which are NOT tariff'd when the systems with those part are assembled and shipped from China. Because we actually have people in the United States assembling systems its negatively impacting business and likely to put us under in the near future. FUCK YOU! You aren't for American jobs. You just are paying back the people who got you elected. Fuck you.
gently slapped on the back of the wrist, with a small feather.
It means absolutely nothing. China will probably never enforce it.
To the simple minded, "intellectuals" sound smart and wise, but these self-annointed elites, who actually have nothing to do with intellect, have been behind some of the greatest evils in human history. People who sit around and think (often foolishly of utopias) while others (everyone from common workers to engineers, scientists, and doctors etc) actually work and solve real problems have a sad history of advocating for and spreading ideologies that sound so very good in a speech or on the page of a book but which end in mass murder when implemented in the real world by real human beings.
"It is not the formulation of ideas, however misguided, but the desire to impose them on others that is the deadly sin of the intellectuals. That is why they so incline, by temperament, to the Left. For capitalism merely occurs; if no-one does anything to stop it. It is socialism that has to be constructed, and, as a rule, forcibly imposed, thus providing a far bigger role for intellectuals in its genesis. The progressive intellectual habitually entertains Walter Mitty visions of exercising power." - Historian Paul Johnson
"The ideas that Karl Marx created in the 19th century dominated the course of events over wide portions of the world in the 20th century. Whole generations suffered, and millions were killed, as a result of those ideas. This was not Marx's intention, nor the intentions of many supporters of Marxian ideas in countries around the world. But it is what happened. Some of the most distinguished intellectuals in the Western world in the 1930s gave ringing praise to the Soviet Union, while millions of people there were literally starved to death and vast numbers of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps. Many of those same distinguished intellectuals of the 1930s were urging their own countries to disarm while Hitler was rapidly arming Germany for wars of conquest that would have, among other things, put many of those intellectuals in concentration camps-- slated for extermination-- if he had succeeded." - Thomas Sowell
I never said it wasn't. I said the work done can fit the available budget. The idea that someone needs to spend more money than they have to make a work of art is ridiculous. For things like medical / basic scientific research that's something that taxes pay for. Doing anything has a cost. That is also a fundamental rule of the universe. (It's called Thermodynamics, and Conservation of Energy and Mass.)
I never said anything about religion. You're the one bringing God into this.
Also, demanding that others pay artists for the ability to even *think* about something in perpetuity, despite them never needing to contribute anything again, isn't what I would call a "stable economy." Especially when they expect that they can have their imaginary property "generate" royalties for just as long out of thin air. I would consider that to be a very "self-important" and "overbearing" demand to place on others. The cost doesn't justify the result, and the further we get away from the street date, the more constrained society's overall source material gets. Eventually artists lock up everything and people can't create anything without an army of lawyers and the funds to pay them. Since so few people have that kind of money, many people will simply avoid creating anything for fear of going bankrupt and society as a whole is worse off as a result of the creative chilling effect.
You didn't read a damn thing did you?
Number one: No, an artist's magnum opus is not worth making themselves bankrupt. If they can't afford to create something without bankrupting themselves in the process, and yes I'm including their profits after taking into account the piracy that will inevitably happen because universe fundamentals, then they shouldn't make it. Period. Full stop. The rest of society is expected to live within their means, artists can too.
Number two: Creating a system that only serves to bankrupt society so artists can make that latest work of "art" is not only ill-advised, but much like the artificial copy restrictions, such a system goes against the laws of the universe. Under such a system, eventually it won't matter how much money artists have. The reason being that eventually artists will use up all of the available supplies and won't be able to create anything else afterwards. Of course I'd imagine we'd see an uprising or two from society long before their resource consumption got to that point.
Number three: The things we have to make we will assuming the resources are there to do it. If there isn't enough available resources, then we'll "recycle" stuff until there is or we realize we can't do it with what we have. Remember the financial incentive was just that an incentive. Before the financial incentive was put in place it was often the case artists didn't make money off of their work, and in some cases "their" work was made in exchange for being fed / allowed to live. Normally they could only work with the materials given to them, had to "adjust" the work to please the contractor, and lost ownership of the work as it was always considered to be "a work for hire." Would artists prefer we bring back those terms considering they apparently need help with resource management?
If you can't do basic financials, and account for that piracy in the overall investment vs. potential profit, then you deserve to go bankrupt. No other industry in all of human history
Welp, China is pulling a USA. It wasn't so long ago when the US blatantly stole EU IP to build up it's economy and become the land of free etc etc just to implement draconian IP laws once they were on top.
Now that China is manufacturing everything, they're doing the same shit.
You mean like the East Texas court massively favours US companies over everyone else?
Or how the USPO does only the most cursory, minimal check for prior art or obviousness before granting patents on rounded corners?
Let's face it, IP laws and enforcement are screwed up all over and every country abuses them for its own benefit.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
More regulations banning capitalism. Just catching up with the west.
Title should read "China Announces Rewards For Intellectual-Property Theft."
Why are you focusing almost exclusively on art-related issues, while the article, and the discussion below it, is mainly related to industry, and very marginally (if at all) to art?
I fully expect that Trump will eventually sign a trade deal with China, and he'll probably include Russia while he's at it. He'll call it the USRCA, USCRA, RUSCA, or something like that. And when you look at the actual details of that trade deal, it's going to read very similar if not be a near perfect copy of the TPP. But it'll have US in the name.
I never said it wasn't. I said the work done can fit the available budget. The idea that someone needs to spend more money than they have to make a work of art is ridiculous. For things like medical / basic scientific research that's something that taxes pay for. Doing anything has a cost. That is also a fundamental rule of the universe. (It's called Thermodynamics, and Conservation of Energy and Mass.)
I never said anything about religion. You're the one bringing God into this.
Also, demanding that others pay artists for the ability to even *think* about something in perpetuity, despite them never needing to contribute anything again, isn't what I would call a "stable economy." Especially when they expect that they can have their imaginary property "generate" royalties for just as long out of thin air. I would consider that to be a very "self-important" and "overbearing" demand to place on others. The cost doesn't justify the result, and the further we get away from the street date, the more constrained society's overall source material gets. Eventually artists lock up everything and people can't create anything without an army of lawyers and the funds to pay them. Since so few people have that kind of money, many people will simply avoid creating anything for fear of going bankrupt and society as a whole is worse off as a result of the creative chilling effect.
You didn't read a damn thing did you?
Number one: No, an artist's magnum opus is not worth making themselves bankrupt. If they can't afford to create something without bankrupting themselves in the process, and yes I'm including their profits after taking into account the piracy that will inevitably happen because universe fundamentals, then they shouldn't make it. Period. Full stop. The rest of society is expected to live within their means, artists can too.
Number two: Creating a system that only serves to bankrupt society so artists can make that latest work of "art" is not only ill-advised, but much like the artificial copy restrictions, such a system goes against the laws of the universe. Under such a system, eventually it won't matter how much money artists have. The reason being that eventually artists will use up all of the available supplies and won't be able to create anything else afterwards. Of course I'd imagine we'd see an uprising or two from society long before their resource consumption got to that point.
Number three: The things we have to make we will assuming the resources are there to do it. If there isn't enough available resources, then we'll "recycle" stuff until there is or we realize we can't do it with what we have. Remember the financial incentive was just that an incentive. Before the financial incentive was put in place it was often the case artists didn't make money off of their work, and in some cases "their" work was made in exchange for being fed / allowed to live. Normally they could only work with the materials given to them, had to "adjust" the work to please the contractor, and lost ownership of the work as it was always considered to be "a work for hire." Would artists prefer we bring back those terms considering they apparently need help with resource management?
If you can't do basic financials, and account for that piracy in the overall investment vs. potential profit, then you deserve to go bankrupt. No other industry in
Is'nt this 90% of Alibaba's business?
The Chinese don't just permit IP theft ... they PIONEERED it.
This is the pot calling the kettle black.
Because it is mentally easier to rail against artists who are seen as "non-/. readers" than IP issues which actually DO affect /. users.
After all, without IP protections, the precious GPL is worthless, and that's not something that can be contemplated when railing against IP. Easier to rail against artists and musicians and the like, than to convince a bunch of open-source users that what they want will effectively destroy open-source.
It's the same reasoning as to why people claim you "can't pirate GPL" - yes you can. You distribute binaries without source automatically infers piracy, because you're not agreeing to the GPL. When that happens, your rights to use the program fall back to "all rights reserved" copyright law. Which means any distribution rights (granted to you by the GPL) no longer exist, and subsequent distribution falls against copyright law.