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Comment by pasbesoin | Hacker News Reader

What scares me, in terms of technical competition, are things like Bunnie Huang's description of the differing and sometimes more flexible approaches to intellectual property, construction, and fulfillment.

Will the West end up fighting its own lawyers, while the East avoids such at times either through differing social structure or a top-down mandate to "get out of the way so it can get done"?

The flipside, perhaps: Your startup is yours, until the State decides it is important to the State. Thereafter, maybe not so much.

I'm no expert -- hardly. But these differences come to mind when I stew on the topic.

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China has historically paid less attention to IP, largely because they didn't create much of it themselves. That's changing. China is on track to handle more patent cases than any other country: http://www.finnegan.com/resources/articles/articlesdetail.as.... As Chinese brands become valuable in and of themselves, as opposed to being behind some Western brand, trademark filings are skyrocketing: http://www.uspto.gov/news/speeches/2013/rea_fordham_china.js....

Part of this is in response to TRIPS obligations. But Western countries have been trying to get China on board for decades. What's changing now? What's changing is that Chinese companies have IP to protect now.

I think Westerners underestimate value in IP, it is extremely important and China is beginning to realize that they need to enforce protections. They have already begun to open up courts for IP.

We're all over-hyping China these days, as they get larger, they will become more like a Western country (unless they want to experience the riots of the middle class, like Turkey, Brazil, etc). I think people fail to realize that China's authoritarianism is incredibly unsustainable. As they open up their markets, country, etc., the channel of ideas and information becomes larger and much more harder to regulate. Just take a look at the comments Weibo, NetEase, etc. There are a lot eye opening anti-government comments before the sensors come in.

I doubt that China will have a stronger software industry & a bigger startup scene than the U.S. in the following decades.

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