China Defends Its IP Practices, Says 'We Paid Up' 214
hackingbear writes "Countering accusations that China's high-speed rail technologies are knockoffs, the head of China's Intellectual Property Administration in a conference said (paraphrasing): "We bought technologies from German, Japan, France, and Canada. We paid up. It is perfectly legal. We then innovate on top of them like most other inventions in the world. Why is that pirating?' (Link is to a Google translation; here is the original.) He cited China's ability, the world's first, to build high-speed rail in a high mountain area as an example of additional innovation."
Human Translated Links and More POVs (Score:5, Informative)
Patent and innovation discourse aside, it should be noted there's an interesting piece comparing the locality of populations [theatlantic.com] in the US vs China. Let's face it, China (and the Southeast Asia region this connects them with [indiatimes.com]) have a higher population density and a greater need for this high speed lengthy rail. It's also going to bring much needed economic development via freight shipments to very poor areas [english.cri.cn] that the United States probably wouldn't experience on a corresponding scale.
Oh, also, there's some pretty entertaining rail-envy springing up [foxbusiness.com].
And before you call it outright theft, consider the history of the "technology transfer" [npr.org] program that seeded all this. It sounds like there's going to be lengthy lawsuits lasting a decade or more and that the companies have reason to sue -- good reason. I wonder how this is going to affect future "technology transfer" programs to China. Also, one last bit of praise: NPR's radio coverage of this has been top notch [npr.org].
Re:Human Translated Links and More POVs (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Human Translated Links and More POVs (Score:3, Informative)
What China is encouraging is businesses to no longer patent certain processes and methods, instead opting for the trade-secret route. While the /. population in general probably feels less patents are good, it isn't. Instead of teaching the world about flim-flams and boffin-tubes, Alstrom and Siemens will lock up their technology inside a vault as "Trade Secrets" [wikimedia.org], jealously guard it from outsiders and even insiders who don't need to know. Innovations stumbles and we all suffer as a whole.
Actually, it would be a preferable state of affairs at this point. It's been a while since patents actually served their intended purpose anyway. There's an entire legal specialty dedicated to producing over-broad patents that at the same time don't ACTUALLY provide the information needed to reproduce the technology. Likewise, they're far too good at the game of interlocking patents to make sure that even when the first expires there is a thicket of newer patents to make sure nobody can use the supposedly unencumbered invention years after the patent expires.
The nice thing about trade secrets is that they only work for genuine innovators. There are no trade secret trolls. Someone else's trade secret can't claim ownership of my own work just because they one time considered a similar solution to a similar problem (or they just thought it up but couldn't solve the last problem needed to make it practical). If they want to sue me, they have to show that I actually stole their trade secret, not just that the solution I came up with happens to be similar to the one they came up with. Trade secrets automatically fail if they are obvious.
By all means, let Bezos lock the one click "innovation" up in a vault and watch as a zillion others independently re-invent his "non-obvious" trade secret in about as long as it takes to type in the php code.
Re:Human Translated Links and More POVs (Score:3, Informative)
We did the same damn thing for a long time. The USA was the IP infringer of the day as we built our nation. Everyone goes through this.