Comment by aneth4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aneth4 | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people claiming the US does this as well, which is true to a certain extent.

There are major differences though. The Chinese government (sometimes via state-owned enterprises) steals information and technologies - military, industrial, and commercial - from military and civilian targets and leaks these to their military and industry. A large part of China's success in the last decade stems from these stolen technologies.

China as a whole is a massive IP stealing machine, and their work is nearly done. They've neither licensed nor innovated the vast majority of the technologies they use - they just steal. This is changing now as they've stolen nearly enough to catch up, and now innovation is finally coming from China.

All countries do this to some extent. Not all countries make a policy of the practice and use the resources of their military and government to carry it out. There are lots of other IP stealing tactics - from joint ventures, to technology "partnerships", to "trial order inspections".

You've got to give them credit: they've play the game very, very well, and taken full advantage of the west's naiveté.

> China as a whole is a massive IP stealing machine, and their work is nearly done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_silk

«Although silk was well known in Europe and most of Asia, China was able to keep a near monopoly on silk production. The monopoly was defended by an imperial decree, condemning to death anyone attempting to export silkworms or their eggs. Only around the year 300 CE did a Japanese expedition succeed in taking some silkworm eggs and four young Chinese girls, who were forced to teach their captors the art of sericulture.

…

While the Chinese lost their monopoly on silk production, they were able re-established themselves as major silk supplier (during the Tang dynasty) and industrialize their production in a large scale (during the Song dynasty). China continued to export high-quality fabric to Europe and the Near East along the silk road.

…

Much later, following the Crusades, techniques of silk production began to spread across Western Europe. In 1147 while Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos was focusing all his efforts on the Second Crusade, the Norman king Roger II of Sicily attacked Corinth and Thebes, two important centres of Byzantine silk production. They took the crops and silk production infrastructure, and deported all the workers to Palermo, thereby causing the Norman silk industry to flourish. The sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 brought decline to the city and its silk industry, and many artisans left the city in the early 13th century. Italy developed a large domestic silk industry after 2000 skilled weavers came from Constantinople. Many also chose to settle in Avignon to furnish the popes of Avignon.

The sudden boom of the silk industry in the Italian state of Lucca, starting in the 11th and 12th centuries was due to much Sicilian, Jewish, and Greek settlement, alongside many other immigrants from neighbouring cities in southern Italy.[24] With the loss of many Italian trading posts in the Orient, the import of Chinese styles drastically declined. Gaining momentum, in order to satisfy the rich and powerful bourgeoisie's demands for luxury fabrics, the cities of Lucca, Genoa, Venice and Florence were soon exporting silk to all of Europe. In 1472 there were 84 workshops and at least 7000 craftsmen in Florence alone.»

Interesting tidbit of history, but not sure I get your point. This pre-dates international IP conventions and the flourishing of innovation in the modern age, and this was a single technology over which China had a monopoly hundreds of years.

Nobody is saying the west never steals anything. There is a difference between pointing out one occurrence of a technology being "stolen" 500 years ago and a modern policy of government supported IP theft through hacking, trickery, and contract violation.

You may be interested in learning how Hollywood came into existence (http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf) or America's roles in industrial revolution (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-01/piracy-and-fraud-pr...).

Most of the industries that vigorously support intellectual property now benefited the most from public domain knowledge and blatant piracy of ideas.

There are plenty of "stolen" inventions, you can start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Great_Inventions

Talking about and "government supported IP theft", the "They" in "They took the crops and silk production infrastructure, and deported all the workers to Palermo" from the excerpt I quoted refers to "the Norman king Roger II of Sicily" and "Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos". Those were surely _govern sponsored_.

My point is an easy one: history repeat itself.

Just to back up your point of "most countries have", the report in [1] provides an interesting read. It also shows America previously performing industrial espionage as well, targeting both government and civilian targets, and commonly passing valuable information along to domestic companies. China's just doing it all far more loudly and explicitly.

Brief Examples from European Parliament's "Report on existence of ECHELON"[1]:

NSA vs Airbus: Intercepted orders and contracts for aircraft between Airbus and the Saudi Arabian national airline. Also exposed bribes paid by the European Airbus Consortium American. American company (McDonnel-Douglas) won $6bn contract after exposing bribery and competing against deals.

NSA intercepted details of Enercon's gear-less wind generator technology to a US firm which may have allowed them to patent the invention in America before Enercon

NSA/CIA vs Thomson-Alcatel: Bribery exposed for winning Brazillian contract (US $1.4bn), Clinton pressures Brazillian govt to awarding the contract to the US firm Raytheon

CIA hacked into computer system of the Japanese Trade Ministry to assist in negotiations on import quotas for US cars on the Japanese market

[1]: http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep-fin.htm#10 (Ctrl+F "Published cases") [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy (good overview)

It's interesting that we use the word "stealing" for this. Intellectual property is a wishy-washy term, defined entirely by the laws of the land. If China's laws and philosophy don't recognize United States IP laws, then it's not really "stealing" on their end.

Perpetuating the mentality that US ideas of IP are the only ones in town does a great deal of harm (see: RIAA, MPAA), and quickly leads to absurdity. Maybe we all deserve Chinese justice on account of us stealing their paper technology?

China does not have the kind of high minded ideals that angsty westerners like to project on to them. They are pragmatists. The see the arc of their economy following that of the U.S. Watch what happens as they become a net exporter of technology rather than merely a user of technology.

This has nothing to do with different ideas of IP. China has similar IP laws as the US, and certainly tries to enforce them when the theft is in the other direction.

It's funny how things change...

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Isaac McPherson (13 Aug. 1813) [ http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.... ]

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

I wonder if we can say that Europeans "stole" the inventions they saw in China 2000 years ago.

Perhaps. Does that matter? Regardless, there were no international IP laws and treaties at that time.

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