China has got this one right, no one should patents on ideas/inventions and if someone can make something better then so be it! Specially with drugs and medical equipment absolute joke we allow companies to hold patents on cures and treatments and allow research to be done behind closed doors. If humanity ever wants to progress we are going to have to start being more open the idea of sharing our ideas/designs/inventions. Ffs all IT folk should know this, without RFC's and sharing we would of never had the internet and the tools we have today.
EU politely asks if China could stop snaffling IP as precondition for doing business
The EU yesterday escalated its complaint to the World Trade Organization that China "forces" Western companies to surrender valuable intellectual property (IP) as part of doing business there. Five years ago, the US estimated that the value of IP stolen by the Middle Kingdom exceeded the value of US exports to Asia. As China …
COMMENTS
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Monday 24th December 2018 06:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
@ "They are stealing all of the ideas and development work."
There is some evidence that the technology for the Western industrial revolution was ripped directly from China, so bitching when the tables are turned reeks of double standard.
Sadly patents do not equal innovation, they are just a way for those that control the patents to use the courts to say this is mine when the majority, for years, have been just natural extensions of existing concepts.
True innovation i.e. something unrelated to any previous technology comes from the small percentage of odd individuals who see the world is a different light. These people are rarely who the IP hunters employ and they tend not to profit from their innovation as much as say legal and money people.
That the western IP controlers might have, in the past, purely incidentally, provided work in their own countries changed when they found it cheaper to train up the high population/low wages countries and manufacture there instead. Thus patents and the idea of protecting techology was written off for a quick buck, i.e. yet another example of classic western business greed and stupidity and proof that giving control to self serving know-nothings is a path to disaster.
So for my part I would say that patents are only a way of limiting technical advancement so as to maintain the status quo for the existing rich and their croanies, that China are replacing the non-innovating leeches via the latters own greed is just ironic. That China is also doing their own R&D and will have to increasingly do more in order to continue to advance once they have the lead means that innovation will continue but with different people taking the profit.
The odd individuals who come up with the "tech beyond" will continue to exist, perhaps and unlike in the western world would be promoted by China, certainly the current idea that people other than the true innnovators are allowed to give away innovation out of greed hasn't working too well for us.
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Friday 21st December 2018 14:39 GMT codejunky
@TheSkunkyMonk
"Specially with drugs and medical equipment absolute joke we allow companies to hold patents on cures and treatments and allow research to be done behind closed doors"
I dont work for free. I dont imagine many do. The capital costs to develop a drug is huge and then it has to pass testing and various country safety standards. None of that is cheap, none of that is easy. So an amount of time to recoup those costs is necessary if we want anyone to develop new drugs, medical tech, etc. Then when the patent expires anyone can take that hard work and make a generic version.
Much cheaper (still expensive) to make a generic than to develop new cures, but new cures are what we want.
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Monday 24th December 2018 12:04 GMT codejunky
Re: @TheSkunkyMonk
@AC
"It would be a lot cheaper if they did't have such a huge advertising budget, 30%ish on average is the figure I have seen. I.e. the bribe to unscrupulous doctors to push the drug out like candy."
That is one way to look at it. The other is to blow billions on hard work, research, creating cures and improving health in the world- and then trying to actually make some money on it because otherwise it was one huge wasted effort and wont ever be done again.
Yes they advertise and yes it costs. Because they have billions to recover in costs in a world where the few developed countries are the only available source of paying for it, a large portion of the world which will have access to it and generic producers just waiting until the patent runs out.
Would you work for free? Would you work for negative billions?
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Thursday 3rd January 2019 20:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: @TheSkunkyMonk
WTF does working for free have to do with anything?
The biggest component in the cost of the development of a drug is marketing. Marketing exists for one of two purposes. 1, to let people know about your product, fair enough. 2, to make people buy your product even if it isn't suitable or appropriate. It is 2 that is the bribe paid to doctors. Publish studies of the drug in journals etc. and doctors will become aware of it. Pay doctors to push pills out like candy and you end up with serious problems.
Not advertising in this fashion in no way precludes a company from making a profit.
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Monday 7th January 2019 23:22 GMT codejunky
Re: @TheSkunkyMonk
@AC
"WTF does working for free have to do with anything?"
So you wouldnt? So you would work with the aim of trying to make money. And it doesnt matter how good your product is if it isnt marketed well. So you can take the rest of your comment and bin it because its value has suddenly reached the below negative the pharma businesses would be if they didnt have a decent marketing budget.
Btw I hope you dont use mouthwash. The bad breath problem was invented to sell the stuff.
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Friday 21st December 2018 14:50 GMT Phil O'Sophical
if someone can make something better then so be it!
But that's the whole idea of patents. Without them people would have to keep their ideas secret, so that no-one can steal them. With a patent they have to be published (so others can see how to improve them), and in return the original inventor gets a short period of "exclusivity" to benefit from their idea.
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Friday 21st December 2018 15:02 GMT Sandtitz
@TheSkunkyMonk
"China has got this one right, no one should patents on ideas/inventions and if someone can make something better then so be it!"
China doesn't make things better, they just make it cheaper than the competition, partly because of lower labor costs and a big internal market, but also because they don't spend on R&D.
"Specially with drugs and medical equipment absolute joke we allow companies to hold patents on cures and treatments and allow research to be done behind closed doors."
The cost of drug development is super expensive.
Medical equipment costs a lot, because they're specialty products, need many (local) certifications, and the companies producing them are not selling a several X-Ray machines, ultracentrifuges or electron microscopes in large quantities.
"If humanity ever wants to progress we are going to have to start being more open the idea of sharing our ideas/designs/inventions."
Homo homini lupus. Turning all mankind to work for the common good would be the ideal Star Trekkian future but that won't work by just abolishing patents or trade secrets.
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Friday 21st December 2018 15:47 GMT vtcodger
Re: @TheSkunkyMonk
China doesn't make things better, they just make it cheaper than the competition, ...
Replace "China" with "Japan" and that's pretty much word for word what American companies were saying in the 1960s and 1970s. And the 1980s as well right up to the point where the Regan administration "negotiated" a "voluntary" agreement with Japan to limit the number of cheap, high quality, Japanese vehicle imports that were destroying the US auto industry.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the same happen with Chinese products sometime in the next decade or so.
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Friday 21st December 2018 19:28 GMT Sandtitz
Re: @vtcodger
"Replace "China" with "Japan" and that's pretty much word for word what American companies were saying in the 1960s and 1970s."
I'm aware of that.
You seem to imply that China produces better goods than the West World. Foxconn and others may produce some great gadgets, but they're just following Apple's and others' blueprints. What I'm thinking about Chinese manufacturing is the junk that fills AliExpress, everything from fake cosmetics to fake shipping containers, the melamine milk scandal and other faulty or dangerous goods.
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Wednesday 26th December 2018 13:58 GMT MonkeyCee
Re: @TheSkunkyMonk
"Medical equipment costs a lot, because they're specialty products, need many (local) certifications, and the companies producing them are not selling a several X-Ray machines, ultracentrifuges or electron microscopes in large quantities."
The medical manufacturers around here cover all ends. Small cheap field units to proper diagnostic kit.
Most of the big stuff that you mention is sold with 12-20 service contract and the capital cost financed across the same period. The clinicians need it kept up to spec, and it means that you get the same team building and supporting them.
In general medical kit is over engineered and over priced. But there is demand for that, and if you're going to insist on holding quality to the max, then we all know what other parts of the iron triangle have to give way.
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Friday 21st December 2018 14:19 GMT devTrail
Have the cake and eat it
I don't think the problem is just China forcing them to hand over their IP. If they want to squeeze western workers by outsourcing all their production to countries with lower wage they can't do anything else than handing over designs projects and industrial processes with all the related industrial secrets. So they teach them how to manufacture their products, but then they complain because they copy their products.
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Friday 21st December 2018 16:08 GMT vtcodger
Re: Have the cake and eat it
The problem is more one of access to the Chinese market. That's 1,300,000,000 consumers many with some amount of disposable income. Average Chinese income looks to be about $10000 USD per year. That's real money, not PPP. It's a big market and growing at a respectable rate despite the efforts of President Dingbat to spread chaos and disharmony across the planet -- a process known as "Making America Grate Again"
Average Chinese incomes appear to be only a fifth of American, so probably China should still be given some special treatment. But it may be time to start slowly phasing special treatment out. After all, China will likely have the largest economy on the planet within a few years and it does seem a bit weird for an economy that size to get special treatment designated for the "least developed countries"
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Friday 21st December 2018 16:31 GMT devTrail
Re: Have the cake and eat it
The problem is more one of access to the Chinese market. ...
I beg to disagree. It's been American outsourcing that turned China into a big market. I heard corporations wailing that the Chinese were copying their products for decades, back then there wasn't a Chinese middle class making China an interesting market.
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Friday 21st December 2018 14:59 GMT An nonymous Cowerd
and ECHELON?
Quote REPORT, FINAL Session document, 7 September 2001 A5-0264/2001 European Parliament
"on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications" (ECHELON interception system) (2001/2098(INI))
pardon me if I shout, but some ex-members of the royal tank regiment are possibly a bit hard of hearing
Concern was aroused in particular by the assertion in the report that ECHELON had moved away from its original purpose of defence against the Eastern Bloc and was currently being used for purposes of industrial espionage. Examples of alleged industrial espionage were given in support of the claim: in particular, it was stated that Airbus and Thomson CFS had been damaged as a result
this is from http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep-fin.htm Page 11 of 88, I've no idea if the docu has been hidden since then
ECHELON of course is now subsumed into the PRISM mess, apparently, and the previous attackees are now tier-pardner consumers of the raw intel, apparently.
so China is evil for IP theft today, (maybe true) but may well be a PRISM tier partner in seventeen years?
explain international integrity & statecraft to me once again, please, I'm slightly confused
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Friday 21st December 2018 16:36 GMT vtcodger
Re: so just like the US before 1914 then ?
Someone has stolen their trick of stealing IP to become a world leader.
We (the US) largely gave up stealing IP many decades ago. For example, we passed on the opportunity to grab the tooling for the VW Beetle after WWII. So did the British -- on the grounds that the car was "Ugly and noisy". http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20130830-the-nazi-car-we-came-to-love
(But we did grab Werner von Braun and much of his rocket team from Peenemunde.)
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Friday 21st December 2018 17:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
RE:We (the US) largely gave up stealing IP many decades ago.
Of course. Once you've nicked enough to make yourselves a mint, you can afford to play nice and bully others.
The only reason I know about the rather ... lax approach to IP is because Gilbert and Sullivan were forced to put on shows in the US themselves to establish prior art, as (at the time) the US did not respect international copyright.
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Tuesday 1st January 2019 17:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
FALSE
By means of the state-level trade policies and practices, Chinese companies enjoy many advantages over their EU and US competitors. It is by no means "free trade", but a one-sided affair which hugely benefits Chinese corporations.
The chicoms have been playing the "third world country" card to gain unfair advantages and they still exploit it, despite commanding entire markets such as telecoms equipment. Our corrupt elite allowed them to destroy Nortel and Alcatel-SEL.
This must stop or Europe will descend into some sort of third world area.
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Saturday 22nd December 2018 07:58 GMT Pier Reviewer
>> Article 66 of TRIPS encourages developed countries to transfer IP to "least-developed" countries.
...
With skyscrapers dominating the skylines of the Middle Kingdom's supercities, it's debatable whether China qualifies as underdeveloped.
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Least developed != under developed. The former is subjective, the latter objective.
The simple fact of the matter is the US/EU whinge about it (understandably) but keep doing it. If it’s that bad, stop doing it (i.e. pay to build capacity in your own backyard) or STFU.
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Monday 24th December 2018 08:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
A Chinese student once told me....
A Chinese student at university once told me how in Chinese universities a small number of people do the work and the rest of the class copies. I suggested that the geeks could decide to not give away their hard work, to which he looked at me in shock and said that they would have no friends.
I asked about interviews for jobs, he told me by way of example that if 20 positions are available for a job, 18 or 19 will be filled through 'who you know' and the remaining will be filled based on ability..... meaning that it is considered normal and acceptable to exploit the nerds.
Could it be that western organisations are having their collective head flushed down the toilet, without realising that the culture they are partnering with is in the habit of waiting for their nerd 'friends' to produce and then unashamedly swooping
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Tuesday 25th December 2018 12:45 GMT JeffyPoooh
Dumb...
So Apple stops using Foxcon. Now somebody has to actually buy an iPhone and take it back to Shenzhen for examination and disassembling.
Delta: One month.
Same with electric cars.
There are very few counterexample where the critical IP can be secured within an IC that cannot be penetrated or bypassed.
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Tuesday 1st January 2019 17:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Dumb...
More a matter of: China wants "Joint ventures" for high speed trains. They demand technology transfer from each "partner" (read: victim).
A) Get the wheel and suspeńsion technology from Alstom
B) Demand the realtime control software from the Japanese
C) Require Siemens to share the motors and HV technology.
D) Combine A to C in order to build a Chinese version
E) Stop buying any train technology from the Japanese, French and German S4ckers.
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Tuesday 1st January 2019 17:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
It appears that a tiny elite profits from shipping European and US jobs to China. Because they can then expand their IT empires a bit faster as compared to using US or EU hardware.
Google, FB, Apple - megalomanics who care only about themselves and have a strong lobby in Brussels and Washington.
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Tuesday 1st January 2019 16:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
One-Sided Contracts, Chinese Steamroller
The Chinese (by means of Huawei and ZTE and the like) have already destroyed a major part of European and Canadian telecom equipment makers: Nortel, Alcatel-SEL. Nokia and Ericsson are in bad shape.
The Chinese can export whatever they want into the EU at small customs rate, but our companies must produce cars and the like in China, if they do not want to suffer punitive customs rates. Plus we need to hand over lots of IP in the process of "local production".
In other words: the incompetent elite of the EU has signed "one sided contracts" with China and the chicoms exploit it to the max. It is high time to stop this insanity, before we have more our our economy steamrolled. Plus, the Americans are right about the security and defense implications.
http://altwissenschaft.ddnss.de/EDV_Spannungsfeld.html
Google Translate will probably deliver a quite usable English version.