India, middle east, ASENA, africa, etc should steal as much IP as they can and develop. Just like china did. Just like the US did. Just like everyone did.
IMO If the funds used to prevent people from applying technology would be used to fund research instead, the gains would net at least zero.
Right now the benefits are localized to jurisdictions that don't care about IP. It is impossible to measure how much could have been gained from businesses that never existed due to uncertainty arising in the jungle of IPs.
Then you will wind up with the Chitu/Chitubox issue where everybody puts encryption chips into their stuff to lock it down.
Moving everything to the cloud wasn't just about developer convenience. It had the side benefit for companies that their software couldn't be pirated anymore.
In my opinion exclusive rights shouldn't be abolished, they should be time limited (up to a quarter of the human lifespan) and extensions should be gated behind very high taxes.
Humans capture water from the environment for their personal use (e.g. drinking), however, eventually they release that very same water. What modern corporations are doing is akin to sucking a pond dry and swelling up to an absurd size while never intending to release that water back to the environment.
It uses GPU IP from IMG commonly known as PowerVR, the same technology powering current Apple's GPU and some Mediatek SoC. And IMG the company is now wholly owned by Chinese Private Equity Fund. The fund acquired IMG when Apple claimed to no longer be using any of their IP and caused their market valuation to drop by more than 70%.
They still uses PVRTC and are still licensing and paying IMG royalty. Surely if there were little to no IMG tech left Apple could have simply stopped paying them and dont renew the contract. They are not paying substantially less royalty than they were previously either.
The shaders are completely different, the controller is completely different, the command submission structures are different. Sure, it's still a tiled architecture and they probably have to keep PVRTC for compatibility and pay the royalty for that, and you can see some remaining PVR influence in the design. But it's not PVR, and quite possibly has zero actual PVR technology left (as in silicon IP from IMG). They're probably only paying patent royalties.
We know this because we're reverse engineering AGX and IMG just dumped an upstream submission to Mesa and now anyone can compare them. PVR's architecture is, for starters, a lot more insane than Apple's.
The GeForce 4 is 20 years old at this point, and many newer technologies are going to have significantly older patents.
For something that isn't supported at all like raytracing, those API calls would have to be dropped so you'd get a blank screen or only a UI. But something polygon-based, maybe you could drop the resolution and polygon count and that could be translated to the newer API.
> The bigger question is, does it violate any patents?
The former implies the latter.
On the other hand if the IP isn't stolen but would still fall afoul of the patent then I would argue that the patent is wrongly provided. Patents don't exist to protect obvious implementations.
I'm not a lawyer but we all know patent law is all kinds of fucked up.
Isn't it the reverse? Patents are one of the several forms of IP that one can violate, so the latter should imply the former.
Patents incentivize inventors to publicly disclose how their inventions work. They publicly disclose how their invention works and in exchange are given exclusive rights to it for a limited period of time.
This is predicated on the idea that in the absence of such a system, inventors have strong incentives to not disclose how their inventions work, which ultimately slows the spread of knowledge and puts a damper on innovation.
What parts of this do not make sense? How else would you solve the problem of incentives around disclosing how technologies work?
Patents do nothing like this, in fact, they cause inventors to invent around “protected ideas”. Technology history is littered with examples of inefficient implementations become standard to avoid patent infringement. We end up with negative-incentives with patented ideas. In technology, a patent is a sure way to ensure that an idea is never implemented.
Nothing about patents, or the idea that an idea is exclusive and protection worth is worth salvaging. Patents do not achieve their stated goal.
Closed source software is inherently untrustworthy. The incentive to disclose ideas protected against plagiarism can be achieved through both public trust in our free and open source ecosystem without the need to enforce state violence because some dude dreamed an idea once and wrote a paper.
This assertion is being made without evidence.
Can you point to any modern technologically advanced civilizations / nations that do not have something like a patent system? How did those without well developed legal frameworks for intellectual property perform over time relative to others in measures of scientific output and economic development?
What is the alternative? Wouldn’t open source have been the default prior to the invention of patent law?
I am sorry, but if you are arguing for the abolition of the patent system, then you need to provide some alternative solution for the problem the patent system addresses along with some sort of data / evidence that your solution is not vastly inferior. Otherwise the argument is just not very persuasive.
There is also Hollywood, the place where Edison could not get his film patents enforced, so every film maker ran to there. Rampant patent infringement made it great.
Or inside Europe, there were cities complaining how the guild IP rules were not enforced on farms. People bought e.g. cheap low quality pots and pans on the farms, with no frivolities or no correct marks, and no money was paid to the guilds. For shame! This was without patents, with guilds being very protective of their knowledge, and inventions still spread without much trouble.
Necessity is generally the mother of invention. Patents just slow things down to protect the established players.
Without this the argument rests on an unstated assumption / magical thinking, which is not borne out by historical data.
It’s like saying that traffic lights impede the flow of traffic (true), without acknowledging the fact that not having traffic lights would result in much greater congestion (also true).
Sorry but the situation now it that one can not even fart without breaking some patent. It is ridiculous, serves only big corps and keeps smaller companies under constant threat of litigations they can not afford. And most of the patents are plain obvious.
I was once asked to come up with the idea of how to implement some XXX feature. It had taken me about 10 minutes to "invent" the main approach and then couple of days to spec it down to such form that it could be given to subcontractor. Upon checking however we've easily found at least 10 patents covering this exact XXX. And this is everywhere.
From a tool to compensate the inventors the patents system has become a tool to serve fat cats.
(This is just a quick googling. I have no skin in this game either way, but I believe that the assertion that Chinese companies always steal is a bigoted position to take. Perhaps a more accurate description would be that IP is most commonly held by incumbent businesses, and businesses in China in new segments are, necessarily, new to market.)
That being said, there is still plenty of legit innovation coming from China and Chinese founders/contributors: ant framework for react, vue, tiktok.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence a lot of the innovation is in the software sector, especially ML, which has less incumbent IP protections.