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Comment by lockhouse | Hacker News Reader

Chinese culture doesn’t respect intellectual property in general, why would they treat open source licenses any differently?

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The USA is a signatory to the Madrid Treaty Protocol governing international intellectual property rights, but never bothered to ratify it. What might a different country who has bothered to ratify the treaty and been subjected to litigation and trade enbargos at the behest of America maybe think about the behavioral example? There's just one example of a international famous trademark enforcement against American interests which is Societé Des Bains De Mer, the owners of the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco in the 9th District in 2001. Just that solitary case of reciprocal enforcement.

Those computers took a fairly significant effort to design, source components, and run through manufacturing. You'd think at some point they'd be self aware enough that the open source they're adulterating also required similar levels of gratis effort and should be afforded some respect.

If you looking into Chinese culture [1][2], it is astonishingly autocratic. Creativity is frowned on, and criticizing superiors is nearly impossible. There is a very strong "do what is asked, no questions" attitude. Business has very strong "nothing matters once I have your money" policy. I took South East Asian history in college, and Chinese culture is abundantly self-sabotaging. It was morbidly fascinating, which is why I took several courses on it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza [2] https://www.youtube.com/@laowhy86

> Business has very strong "nothing matters once I have your money" policy.

Western business now has adopted "nothing matters once I got your personal data" policy though. It seems that "nothing matters" policy is not restricted to Asia.

Opening up to China has not made that country more Western, it could be argued it has made the world more Chinese.

See also: VCs talking glowingly about how "productive" 996 makes Chinese companies and how US employees should be working similar hours to keep up.

Greed knows no national boundaries, and the societal norms that kept it somewhat under control in the West are being rapidly eroded.

I cringe when I see the term "Western" vis-a-vis countries in East Asia. How does it sound if we say "modern"? That sounds better to me. Why? Then, it includes Korea, Japan, and Taiwan -- all very modern, but not at all "Western".

I agree with your sentiment, but the collective delusion to open up to China was not an attempt to make it more modern. It truly was an attempt to westernize it. In the colonial, racist sense. The Allied powers wanted to westernize Japan and Korea as well after the second world war.

Makes me wonder how much innovation would the west see again if only we got rid of IP lawyers

Case law, at least in England and Wales, is on the side of whoever makes something out of disused or dormant designs and patents. The equitable ruling will always be made in favour of the technical infringer paying a reasonable royalty provided that use and application does not harm the rights owner.

What makes you think this is related to “chinese culture” as opposed to “circumstance”? Without qualification it looks like a great demonstration of the fundamental attribution error [0] and a very fashionable position to have in today’s western world.

0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_erro...

I see a section with short vertical videos on Youtube that strongly resembles a certain Chinese mobile app. Could it be that those Chinese developers, not respecting intellectual property, are now working for Youtube?

Or maybe not respecting intellectual property when it is profitable is just a worldwide tradition?

Copying an idea is one thing. Outright stealing source code is on different level. i.e. See how Huawei got big - By copying hardware of Cisco routers and loading there Cisco firmware.

You can always check out the Huawei Github, here's some very interesting LTE modem firmware sources :

https://github.com/Huawei-LTE-routers-mods/README

I remember seeing that the main activity or whatever it was of the YouTube app was called something like “YoutubeTiktokApplication”

That wasn’t the exact name, I’ll try to find it, but it definitely had TikTok in the name

I could also be wrong here because I was trying to patch it with ReVanced or something at the time so it could be related to the patcher

I’m not saying that means they’re copying TikTok’s source code but it’s just an odd thing I wanted to share

Someone downvoted me, it does sound odd but I think it was true, here’s someone else seeing the same thing:

https://twitter.com/imShreyasPatil/status/132039916265180364...

However someone said this: “Tiktok is an internal component in Google used by many of the apps, it was written and named like that before the social network existed and is absolutely unrelated.”

You’re right, it reminds me of Silicon Valley’s Vine. Or is that not what you meant?

I remember seeing this name but never heard of anyone using it. So I don't think that Youtube would copy an unpopular app.

YouTube Shorts is a clone of Musical.ly (now rebranded as TikTok) which was a clone of Vine.

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