Would-be startup crew charged with stealing employer's tech Four former Applied Materials employees have been charged with stealing the company's chipmaking technology to use as the basis for their own startup. The US Department of Justice says that Liang Chen, Donald Olgado, Wei-Tung Hsu, and Robert Ewald conspired to steal designs and prototypes of Applied Materials metal organic …
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So China is now doing to the USA what the USA did to the European powers in the 19th century? Ignore foreign patents and "steal" technologies, initially to develop products for use in your large domestic market. After you overtake your competitors, then you need to protect your technology, so you become a fervent protector of "intellectual property"?
What do you mean "now doing"? They've been openly doing this for decades. Back around 2000 when I worked in the semiconductor industry as an engineer it was well known that Chinese companies would buy thousands of devices each month for several months and then just stop buying. When asked why they'd stopped buying them they just openly admitted "we've worked out how you make them and are now making them ourselves". We had samples of parts that even had our logos on them that had been counterfeited in China. On the whole the parts worked, but there were slight design differences where they'd taken shortcuts in the manufacturing process and built in potential failure points. Little things like bonding wires being crossed over (runs the risk of the wires short circuiting when encapsulated).
> When asked why they'd stopped buying them they just openly admitted "we've worked out how you make them and are now making them ourselves".
if they can do it cheaper, and the quality can be made as good as yours, then license production to them and take royalties.
You'll probably make a bigger profit too.
When I worked for IBM in Germany in the 60s, we would joke that, when we made an error in a design document, "That's to confuse the Russians." And in the 90s, when I was working at a small telecom equipment company, a Chinese competitor came out with an identical product, identical down to the details of the layout of the circuit board.
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