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Comment by totalZero | Hacker News Reader

Would you mind pointing me to some specific cases of US technology companies stealing IP from European companies as the US was industrializing, or Japanese technology companies (including Nintendo) stealing IP? It is often more informative to speak about specific cases, rather than generalizing based on inexplicit information.

Businesses use IP laws to protect their own property rights. Whether you call the property owners "winners" is up to you, but that doesn't change the spirit or letter of IP laws.

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We Were Pirates, Too

>The ship carrying Francis Cabot Lowell and his family home from England in the summer of 1812 was intercepted by a British war squadron, which held the passengers and crew for some days at the British base at Halifax, Canada. Lowell’s baggage was subject to several intensive searches, for his captors had been warned that he may have stolen designs for power textile weaving machinery, a serious crime in England. Lowell, indeed, had done just that — but, aware of the risk, had committed the designs to memory.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/

Interesting paper and I think anyone should read if only for the stories told, but if the only cases happened in the 1800s, then I don't think this is particularly relevant for deciding whether we should enforce consequences on foreign companies for IP infringement or not. The US also permitted racial slavery in that era - we ceased commerce both voluntarily and in an official manner with South Africa over their racially stratified society in 1990. Why would we treat China differently than Apartheid South Africa because of something that happened 200 years ago?

The US has been dominant economically since the late 1800s, when their incentives switch to protecting IP. If the theory of the above poster that IP is used to pull the ladder up is true then it does make sense.

Incidentally, US Foreign policy (as well as that of any nation) even in 2020, when you take justifications, stunningly aligned with US national interest. Make of that what you will.

The US has become a very developed market since then, though certainly not the "dominant market", but regardless should we as actors in the current legal system advocate for something that gives preferential treatment of Chinese businesses OR an entirely different system with very little protections for IP?

I don't think so, and would actually prefer we take on something closer to the Chinese approach of leasing land in the same way we encourage people to put ideas in the public domain for a guarantee of a period of market monopoly. Though there are many reforms about current US IP law that I would love to see.

>US Foreign policy (as well as that of any nation) even in 2020, when you take justifications, stunningly aligned with US national interest.

I disagree - most nations advocate for their self-interests, otherwise we would be the United States of the World right now rather than the United States of America. Similarly, many countries have a foreign policy favorable to China because of economic incentives with a voluntary relationship between them. Are all countries or localities as equally 'autonomous' as China or the US when deciding with whom their most beneficial economic relationships are? No, though I don't think "dropping IP law" is a particular benefit to increasing that autonomy either.

Asides from Afghanistan and Iraq, are there any states you can name that are advocating for almost objectively US aligned policy?

I meant that most nations action's align with their interests, not their rhetoric or ideology.

I'm not making a claim as to what we should do, I'm just saying that our current IP system has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with Western power and interest.

Personally I think a system such as the one you described is preferable too, but I'm just explaining the Realist (and by extension Materialist in the Fuerbachian sense, and thus Marxist, and thus Chinese) perspective on why laws are the way they are (which is incidentally correct), by contrast with the Idealist narrative that States tend to use to justify their interests.

> our current IP system has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with Western power and interest.

Property rights are neither a question of morality nor a question of realpolitik. They are an economic construct. Property is the only so-called natural right that does not exist at birth. We are born with life, and we are born with liberty, but we are not born with property.

I never understood this line of argument. Economics is 100% inextricable from realpolitik. Whether you have a socially constructed economic right or not is 100% a question of realpolitik.

Also, private property simply isn't a natural right, not even by the definition of Hobbes. The right of exclusion of something you don't use is neither natural nor universal in most early human civilizations, it just simply isn't a natural right.

And intellectual property in particular is perhaps the opposite of a natural right.

Locke ran with Life, Liberty, and Estate but even the American founding fathers went with the idea that Estate is an socioeconomic construct for the purpose of "freedom".

Wait, weren't the US and England at war in the summer of 1812? Wartime hardly seems like a reasonable comparison. Britain had been impressing American navy personnel (making them slave soldiers) for years by that time.

Famous case in Japan is Hitachi/Mitsubishi stole IBM's property.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/23/business/japanese-executi...

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