Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

While I found the original article believable and interesting, I can't help but wonder whether there's more than meets the eye to all this "Oh yeah, China is evil" movement that's developing...

The US government has been trying to get China to "behave" for quite some time. One of the very obvious points of contention is copyright law - as someone once said, "Chinese copyright is the right to copy anything they want". Now, the previous article painted this from the point of view of massive industrial IP theft - theft of patents, technologies, etc.

But we all know that there's another kind of IP that has a lot of influence over the governments of the world, and that's media IP - music, books, movies, etc.

It's clear that both are happening to some extent, but what are the proportions? Is 99.9% of the "Chinese IP problem" to do with stolen media? To do with the fact that you can buy pirated DVDs on every street corner? Or is it 99%? 90%? 10%? Basically, is the main force behind all this anti-china discussion the media lobby, or is it a somewhat more bona fide effort to protect more legitimate industry?

Cause I have to say - if I have a choice between the Chinese model of media copyright (i.e., no copyright protection) and the US one, I'll pick the Chinese one. It's a better starting point for improvement than the current US model.

It's especially interesting given that the U.S. model for IP is pragmatic rather than ideologic, i.e. temporary government-granted monopolies are a necessary evil we accept in order to further technological and creative progress for the benefit of all citizens.

Considering the opinion many here have that innovation in the U.S. is stifled rather than encouraged under the modern politicized IP model, it might be enlightening to compare how effective innovation is under each model. I am curious how much sustained innovation is happening over there versus the highly-publicized accounts of IP 'theft'?

temporary

Practically speaking, copyrights are perpetual in the US. If something is copyrighted for life plus 90 years, I'm not going to see anything made during my lifetime enter the public domain naturally.

This is true, but it was not always the case. That copyrights last so long now is the result of change due to political pressure.

Even as recently as 1998 copyright was only authors life plus 50 years, and less before that.

Pros and cons of IP aside, the fact of the matter is that American companies have the money and talent to do high quality R&D. Most Chinese companies simply don't have the capital to do R&D to the standard of a developed country, and most talents go work for western companies that have the money.

If IP laws were enforced in China, Chinese companies would be further kept at the bottom of the food chain, making cheap products in sweatshops at very low margins. The IP policies in China is meant as way to jumpstart domestic companies by letting them compete in higher-margin value-added goods when they don't have the ability to do their own research. The policy-makers know that they suck at most things, especially as a venture capitalist, so they go with the least-interfering approach.

Of course, eventually they'll have to enforce IP to sustain their own R&D, once their industries mature.

I think people are drawing conclusions too quickly. The current leadership is generally more pragmatic than this. There is benefit to rooting the activists. There's little benefit (from the eyes of the politburo) to a brazen reprisal like this. And why would they care about what some fringe foreigner says? Chinese are much more status conscious, and the ravings of some dude on the internets doesn't carry that much weight.

The younger generation is by contrast much more nationalistic and internet savvy, and a vigilante attack against an outright "Chinese are evil" article like the original is not unlikely. After all, we've seen Russian hackers doing it to Ukrainian sites.

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