In China, plagiarization is an established business model | Hacker News Reader

In China, plagiarization is an established business model

zdnet.com

14 pointsseanmcdirmid15 comments

This is a very big problem in China's startup scene; even Qihoo is very dodgy and might not have a real business plan. Lee Kai Fu's Innovation Works are trying to break this habit; they are starting fairly small and looking for startups that could have YCombinator-style exits. I'm not aware of any other incubators, at least in Beijing, this is still a very new thing.

Actually, there is a lot of money sloshing around in China looking for places to go, given the opaque stock market, bad real estate market, and strict capital controls. But just knowing that someone will probably rip off your idea if you are even semi successful makes investing way too risky.

How long will it take for China to go through what the US experienced in the 1800s? Back then the American companies were the one pirating British designs, technology, and copyright, making poor, inferior copies at first, only later to find their own superior methods.

Even Japan followed this pattern of emulation and later refinement, and more recently Korea has entered the stage where it's carving its own path, not just making knock-offs but best-of-breed products in certain categories.

There's a point where you can no longer gain anything by stealing, but is this because everyone you're competing against has already caught up, too, and now you must go beyond in order to survive?

Maybe China's pressing need for solar, which other countries seem relatively uninterested in, will be the start of that shift.

But that part has already happened; China has copied the industrial capacity of the west and you could say even improved on that.

There is some amount of protectionism to the Internet though: whereas the British were trying to prevent the technology from flowing out, China is actually trying to prevent the technology from flowing in, indirectly through their blocking policies. That is very self defeating, it means the Chinese are copying business models and designs, and they aren't very focused on developing better technology (where the web is concerned, at least).

You could have a thousand examples of the copy->innovate->invent development cycle, but most Americans simply won't ever believe Chinese people can invent things until it happens. Nevermind that Chinese people invented all sorts of stuff - "what have you done for me lately?"

Just look at Japan - the thought that Toyota and Honda could ever make cars better than Detroit used to be completely outlandish... then it was Koreans. Now it's Chinese (a Chinese car? HA! WHAT A JOKE!)

It's just racism, plain and simple.

The public perception curve for developing Asian countries in America goes something like this: Ridicule -> Dismissal -> Contempt -> Acceptance -> Reverence

Reflect upon where Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, China, all fall along this curve, and where they were 10, 20, 30 years ago.

I don't think its fair to call that attitude 'racist'. Anyone trying to accomplish something great is ridiculed at one point or the other.

Anyway, the point about the copy->innovate->invent cycle is a very interesting one. I'm guessing that the competence (and possibly, sales) that copying gives to the copier builds their confidence which is then applied to solve genuine problems, which leads to genuine progress.

Don't be too quick to call "racism" on what is more anti-nationism. Is saying Portugal will never have a viable space program not racist, but saying Vietnam never will somehow? I think the word you want is "prejudiced".

Copying != plagiarism. Plagiarism is about pretending to be the original author of the ideas - maybe there were some examples of that in the article - but the bulk was about simple imitation without appropriating the authorship.

Conflating of copying and plagiarism is another attack on the Copy-left culture (but it can also be effect of the authors stupidity).

Plagiarism, dammit, the word is plagiarism! (I know that it's that way in the original, but I don't feel like creating another fershlugginer account just to bitch about diction.)

  Tencent QQ boasts 721 million active accounts.

Numbers like that blows my mind. It's twice over the population of the US.

In Europe everybody and their brother have their own struggling Groupon-clone.

"Baidu’s search engine is a copy of Google’s. " Not True. The founder of Baidu received a US patent for search engine result page ranking back in 1996. So it is not a simple copy.

Isn't web search quite an old field? It was around in 1996. Before that there was AltaVista and Excite.

RankDex is definitely not as good as PageRank with respect to results, I'm sure they have moved beyond that by now. I think what Baidu did copy outright was Google's minimalistic look and feel, which is definitely not very Chinese but appreciated nonetheless. Same with qqmail and gmail.

Every search engine did this, even Yahoo (search.yahoo.com).

Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0

There was a portion of Top Gear about this in the last series, where the presenters travelled to China and showed off nearly exact copies of other automakers' vehicles, such as BMW (who have sued the Chinese companies in the past and lost in Chinese court). I don't believe this is limited to startups and the Internet, and I think that the Chinese have just become very good at copying things.

Best copy I can find: http://vimeo.com/40226173

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