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Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

bloomberg.com

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Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#41

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

arkades wrote: post #20
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be that as it may, this is a report of a filed lawsuit. It's a lot harder to get the fact that a lawsuit was filed wrong, as it's trivial to verify. They even listed the docket number.

There’s “reporting the facts,” and then there’s all the context and background work that constitute the journalism bit. One can do the former and still fail utterly at the latter.

And there's more than one journalist and editor at Bloomberg, and people excel at different things. Even WCCFTech gets leaks right once in a while.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#42

Post by nullwasamistake »

ETHisso2017 wrote: post #40
gamblor956 wrote: post #33

Chinese companies have a very long history of state-supported IP theft. When a Chinese product so obviously mimics an American product--especially when the chief engineer used to work for the American company--it's on the Chinese company to prove that no IP theft occurred. They've lost the benefit of the doubt.

Xenophobia and disdain for due process all wrapped in less than 100 words. Someone get this guy a medal for brevity.

There's nothing wrong with pointing out a pattern

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#43

Post by mindgam3 »

khuey wrote: post #38
mindgam3 wrote: post #11

The optics of this aren't great for Magic Leap. AR pun not intended. Really all this does is present Nreal as a legitimate threat to a company that raised approx 100x more money* before shipping a product. (* Magic Leap funding $2B+, nreal $16M ish)

I don't want to take any position on either Magic Leap as a product/company or on this lawsuit, but it's not at all unusual for R&D to cost far more than production. This is how drug development works: someone spends billions researching and developing a drug and gets a temporary monopoly on production. Once competition is allowed and prices are competed down to the marginal cost of production the generics are close…

I mean, I’m not arguing that there is no plausible explanation for Magic Leap’s inability to ship a product with only $1B in funding. The plausible explanation is that they are running a tech startup like a drug development company, to use your analogy, which is just a terrible way to do startups.

AR/smartglasses is not a market where you will have “generics” any time soon. You’re going to have the iPhone of smartglasses which will dominate, and then everyone else will try and fail to copy. Like Facebook dominating social, then google+ failing. Or iPhone vs Android, although Android did finally manage to achieve market share thanks to googles muscle.

Tl;dr: successful startups don’t raise billions of dollars before shipping a product as mediocre as ML’s v1.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#44

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

arkades wrote: post #20
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be that as it may, this is a report of a filed lawsuit. It's a lot harder to get the fact that a lawsuit was filed wrong, as it's trivial to verify. They even listed the docket number.

There’s “reporting the facts,” and then there’s all the context and background work that constitute the journalism bit. One can do the former and still fail utterly at the latter.

There's really only one sentence that even addresses the context and background with respect to China in this blurb, and that's this one:

"The lawsuit marks the latest accusation from an American firm of intellectual property theft by Chinese companies, a perennial sore point that’s helped escalate tensions between the world’s two largest economies."

Seems pretty fair to me. You'd be hard pressed to say that that's inaccurate or misleading.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#45

Post by AmericanChopper »

ETHisso2017 wrote: post #40
gamblor956 wrote: post #33

Chinese companies have a very long history of state-supported IP theft. When a Chinese product so obviously mimics an American product--especially when the chief engineer used to work for the American company--it's on the Chinese company to prove that no IP theft occurred. They've lost the benefit of the doubt.

Xenophobia and disdain for due process all wrapped in less than 100 words. Someone get this guy a medal for brevity.

There’s nothing xenophobic about commenting on Chinese IP theft. It’s a very well documented problem.

You also don’t have to be against due process to have disdain for existing IP laws. They make things incredibly expensive for people to use to protect themselves, and have spawned an entire industry around their abuse.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#46

Post by briandear »

mindgam3 wrote: post #11

The optics of this aren't great for Magic Leap. AR pun not intended. Really all this does is present Nreal as a legitimate threat to a company that raised approx 100x more money* before shipping a product. (* Magic Leap funding $2B+, nreal $16M ish)

And removing the mistakes made my Magic makes the derivative cost less; Magic used a lot of money figuring out what doesn’t work, money that the competing company did not have to spend. If I make an iPhone copy, I didn’t have to spend all the money Apple spent figuring out what wouldn’t work. So it’s not an apples to apples comparison.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#47

Post by cabotmoose »

ETHisso2017 wrote: post #40
gamblor956 wrote: post #33

Chinese companies have a very long history of state-supported IP theft. When a Chinese product so obviously mimics an American product--especially when the chief engineer used to work for the American company--it's on the Chinese company to prove that no IP theft occurred. They've lost the benefit of the doubt.

Xenophobia and disdain for due process all wrapped in less than 100 words. Someone get this guy a medal for brevity.

Xenophobia accusations aside,

especially when the chief engineer used to work for the American company

I think this certainly shifts the burden of proof to Nreal to prove they did not steal Magic Leap's technology after releasing a very similar product

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#48

Post by shasheene »

arkades wrote: post #15

Hey, did Bloomberg ever retract its entirely unverified Chinese spy chip story? Just a reminder that they’ve blown all their credibility.

You may not be aware of the great talk titled "Modchips of the State" [1] (presented at 35C3 in Dec 2018).

The speaker managed to reproduce the exact single-chip hardware implant attack suggested in the Oct 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek story [2] [3], which claimed Amazon and Apple found malicious hardware implants in Supermicro motherboards while conducting detailed inspections.

While Bloomberg has never retracted the story, there's an argument that the sources have vested interests in lying to Bloomberg suggesting that attacks developed in lab-conditions actually occurred in the real-world, in order to raise awareness of supply-chain risks (something the current US administration has been attempting to do for some time). There's also a suggestion that the journalist was acting in good-faith but mixed up a few different attacks, with the sources reluctant to clarify things. Another suggestion is that the attack did happen, and Amazon and Apple were forced to issue denials.

It's a very fascinating story. Maybe I'm naive, but if Bloomberg was in-fact wrong, they would issue a correction or a retraction. The fact they haven't retracted it suggests to me that there's truth to the story.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7H3V7tkxeA

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJGbcjfJ7rU

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#49

Post by majia »

Lessons learned from Magic Leap: don’t sign a non-compete agreement with your employee; you have to pay and it’s legally not enforceable in California. Ask your employee to sign a board confidentiality agreement and sue him if he works for a competitor.

Also, I wonder if people would think differently if this case is about a Facebook employee left to work on a social media App like google+.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#50

Post by bodi »

nullwasamistake wrote: post #42
ETHisso2017 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xenophobia and disdain for due process all wrapped in less than 100 words. Someone get this guy a medal for brevity.

There's nothing wrong with pointing out a pattern

I like patterns too. For example have you ever noticed China artificially props up the US economy via bonds/debt/investment and in return has flagrantly been allowed to steal pretty much every byte of US IP, both from the private sector and defense with zero pushback from our "intelligence" community, legislature, and only a hand wavey stop it from the Obama admin?

You still like patterns?

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