Dear Cutomers, may I introduce our latest product to You:
Rauter's ANTI WIFI SCREEN CREAM: Just rub this hitech (originally invented by NASA scientists) Nanogel on your body once a day, be protected from the unhealthy effects of Your wireless router's, Your wireless Telephone's or Your Cellphone's radiation for 24 hours non-stop.
I agree with the previous post. I have been working in China at a Chinese company for the past two years. I was mainly building a 'rice sorting machine' there. Rice is the staple food and there is not too much competition in this field from inside the country. My task was to write the software for the device and do some of the hardware development as well. So to start with they gave me a finished mechanical design I could design electronics and software for. After a while I found out that this mechanical design is a one-to-one copy of a Japanese machine. Anyway after all that has been said about Chinese perspective on IP nothing special about that. Later after I finished all the development work and everything seemed to be going accoring to plan, suddenly my bosses became very worried and started talking about software and hardware protection. So I had to integrate some encryption into my programs, sand off the type inscriptions of the MCUs I used and so on. So even they though my company had copied some other design themselves (or maybe just because of that), they wanted to make 100% sure that no one else was going to copy their's. And right they were: One day some sales guys of a customer came by to look at the machine and be present while one is built. I was there as well doing some supervision and so at one time one of these guys takes me aside and asks me: 'Ok Mr engineer, my company can pay you a nice flight to our province and give you quite an amount of money, if you just tell us which password you used to encrypt the software on your machine. Maybe you could email us the schematics as well?'. Hmmm. Well, I did not tell, but mentioned it when I later needed some leverage to make my company pay me the money we had agreed on in the beginning. So you see business tactics in China are just rough. It is definitely the same for foreign and Chinese companies. Only that the later ones are used to it.
So even if the Chinese branch of Google stole code from the other company for their product, it is just a more or less normal business tactic. Also the outcome of an eventual lawsuit would depend more how good their connections (or their opponent's) to the government are than on if they actually stole something or not. As has been mentioned, in China there is the principle of 'Guanxi' (good relations) which (especially in bigger cases) totally overrules all other judicial instances. So the more money you have the more powerful you are. And Google being (besides Baidu.com) the most popoular search engine in China for sure is powerful.
On the other hand the talk about China in a way that they only eat up IP from other countries and cannot produce any by themselves is by my experience not true. Many companies do not just copy things but they actually try to make improved copies (this was certainly the case for the sorting machine). I was assisted by several engineers who really knew what they were doing and would have no trouble to find very well paid positions in the west. Many people who come to China first might have a very high-nosed opinion about Chinese peoples' education, business tactics, manners etc. But if you look at the details when you are there you will find that these things are in no way 'worse' than in our culture, they are just different. And as China's economic rise seems unstoppable, companies should just get ready to deal with this different culture to their advantage. Like Google (maybe) just did.
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Dear Cutomers, may I introduce our latest product to You:
Rauter's ANTI WIFI SCREEN CREAM:
Just rub this hitech (originally invented by NASA scientists) Nanogel on your body once a day, be protected from the unhealthy effects of Your wireless router's, Your wireless Telephone's or Your Cellphone's radiation for 24 hours non-stop.
Only 24$ for 200 mg (of course we care also for Your family and offer huge discounts) Visit: http://www.rauters-anit-wifi-cream.com/
-- 2days Slogan: Get Rauted before you Router gets You! --
I agree with the previous post. I have been working in China at a Chinese company for the past two years. I was mainly building a 'rice sorting machine' there. Rice is the staple food and there is not too much competition in this field from inside the country. My task was to write the software for the device and do some of the hardware development as well.
So to start with they gave me a finished mechanical design I could design electronics and software for. After a while I found out that this mechanical design is a one-to-one copy of a Japanese machine. Anyway after all that has been said about Chinese perspective on IP nothing special about that. Later after I finished all the development work and everything seemed to be going accoring to plan, suddenly my bosses became very worried and started talking about software and hardware protection. So I had to integrate some encryption into my programs, sand off the type inscriptions of the MCUs I used and so on.
So even they though my company had copied some other design themselves (or maybe just because of that), they wanted to make 100% sure that no one else was going to copy their's. And right they were: One day some sales guys of a customer came by to look at the machine and be present while one is built. I was there as well doing some supervision and so at one time one of these guys takes me aside and asks me: 'Ok Mr engineer, my company can pay you a nice flight to our province and give you quite an amount of money, if you just tell us which password you used to encrypt the software on your machine. Maybe you could email us the schematics as well?'. Hmmm. Well, I did not tell, but mentioned it when I later needed some leverage to make my company pay me the money we had agreed on in the beginning.
So you see business tactics in China are just rough. It is definitely the same for foreign and Chinese companies. Only that the later ones are used to it.
So even if the Chinese branch of Google stole code from the other company for their product, it is just a more or less normal business tactic. Also the outcome of an eventual lawsuit would depend more how good their connections (or their opponent's) to the government are than on if they actually stole something or not. As has been mentioned, in China there is the principle of 'Guanxi' (good relations) which (especially in bigger cases) totally overrules all other judicial instances. So the more money you have the more powerful you are. And Google being (besides Baidu.com) the most popoular search engine in China for sure is powerful.
On the other hand the talk about China in a way that they only eat up IP from other countries and cannot produce any by themselves is by my experience not true. Many companies do not just copy things but they actually try to make improved copies (this was certainly the case for the sorting machine). I was assisted by several engineers who really knew what they were doing and would have no trouble to find very well paid positions in the west. Many people who come to China first might have a very high-nosed opinion about Chinese peoples' education, business tactics, manners etc. But if you look at the details when you are there you will find that these things are in no way 'worse' than in our culture, they are just different. And as China's economic rise seems unstoppable, companies should just get ready to deal with this different culture to their advantage. Like Google (maybe) just did.