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The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

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Re: The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

#171

Post by derefr »

nostromo wrote: post #18

> The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential agreements with American companies over the past two decades to access the trade secrets of those companies, only to then misappropriate that intellectual property and use it to fund Huawei’s business. These American companies thought they could build their products for a fraction of the price in China and increase margins. They didn't sto…

I would note that these companies were likely paying a Chinese company's American subsidiary for these services.

Paying an American company—and such a subsidiary shell company, despite being purely a legal fiction, is still an American company—for its services, no matter who owns it, should not result in China being taught how to build your tech; and it's not the responsibility of other American corporations to ensure it is. If such bad things happen, that's the fault of the American government for allowing the business relationship between the foreign company and its American subsidiary to exist, in light of clear treaties (WIPO, for one) that require the American government to embargo trade with countries that don't comply with them.

By analogy: it's not your web browser's responsibility to protect its memory from other processes snooping on it. That's the OS's job. If another process can read your process's memory, it was a failure on the OS's part. The process shouldn't be expected to be spending resources securing its memory; it should be expected only to pay its dues to the OS (in e.g. context switches) such that this gets handled for it.

Re: The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

#172

Post by mythrwy »

mattmanser wrote: post #129
tharne wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to feel too sorry for these companies. It's not exactly a secret that this is how China operates and has operated for a very long time. I see this as a win-win. These U.S. companies tried to take shortcuts by outsourcing to China and they got burned. China engaged in all sorts of unethical and illegal behavior in the process and will (hopefully) get burned.

The irony of this comment is that this intellectual property theft is what America did in the 1700-1800s to get ahead. And America eventually eclipsed the British that they were stealing from, so don't expect China to be "punished" too much.

The amount of invention and technological achievement developed in and by the US I would guess be an order of magnitude higher (at least, maybe 3) then any amount intellectual property theft from other nations in the 17-1800s.

I would not guess this to be true of China nor likely to become true for a very long time at least.

Re: The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

#173

Post by mdorazio »

nl wrote: post #136
mdorazio wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but you need to show that knocking down tariffs like the Vietnam one would actually directly result in more non-Chinese trade. I can pretty much guarantee that even without the 20% tariff, US imports would still be far more expensive than Chinese equivalents. Do you have any economic analysis articles or papers you can point me to that model the expected impacts based on actual market prices and labor costs?

Sure. Here's one on a potential free trade agreement between the US and Malaysia[1] (which is another TPP nation) that calculates direct changes: As shown, following a free trade, the Malaysia’s export to the USA would increase by USD 30984 million or 7 percent and the US export to Malaysia would increase by USD 16051 million(22 percent). The substantial increase in the volume of export between two countries is due t…

Thanks! I'm still looking for an analysis on how this would impact the Asia region in general, and China specifically. For example, from the paper, the net result export impact outside the US-Malaysia trade relationship would be a decline:

"Further, the export of Malaysia and the US to the world is expected to decline by 0.8 percent and 0.1 percent respectively."

But it doesn't break out "rest of world" into groups, so it's not clear what the impact to China would be, if any. To me, the implication is that without a corresponding drop in imports from China, the net result is zero. Unfortunately the tables at the end are garbled, so I can't see in Table 2 what the import impacts would be from their dataset.

Re: The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

#174

Post by blackrock »

fhbdukfrh wrote: post #89
wolco wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will keep singing and dancing and making music like they have always done. Most didn't make money from it. Sheet music changed that briefly, tapes/records/cds. Music = Copyright = money is a modern thing. Getting billions invested in anything won't happen without a return. If a company is limited to a short window before everyone can copy means less funding and more valueless throwaway products.

This is true for a lot of important drugs that don't have massively lucrative markets to recover their investment. This means fewer new antibiotics for global issues and more penis pills.

> fewer new antibiotics

So companies don’t do this, because there is no profit in it? Perhaps, that is the problem with late stage capitalism itself? Everyone wants to become a rent-seeking landlord.

What about a societal need? What about for the survival of the human race?

This is like arguing that humanity can’t muster up the ingenuity to solve something to save the human race, just because there’s no profit in it.

Necessity is the mother of all invention. If there are fewer antibiotics, then maybe this just means that it is not necessary.

Sorry folks! You’re just going to have to take your chances with the Grim Reaper! My bank account can’t be bothered to find a cure for you.

Re: The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

#175

Post by richk449 »

karavelov wrote: post #109
andreilys wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

” They side-step a lot of the planned obsolescence and intentional feature scarcity US companies have become so dependent on to avoid meaningful R&D. ” They also “side-step” the capital and years of research required to come up with the products. Why invest in R&D when you can invest in corporate espionage for a fraction of the cost?

If they didn't invest in research, how were they first to market with 5G solutions?

They even stole the stuff we haven’t invented yet !!

Re: The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

#176

Post by thorowawaytoga »

In a small town in Israel, called Hod Hasharon there was a company named "Toga Networks".

This company was paying as twice as you currenly earn, if you work at Cisco or Juniper. Just like that, as twice as, just ocme work with us.

One year went by, and it turned out that Toga Network is no other than Huawei.

So I do not know about stealing source code, but I know they looked after its IP which is in people's mind.

Re: The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

#177

Post by Canada »

derefr wrote: post #171
nostromo wrote: post #18

> The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential agreements with American companies over the past two decades to access the trade secrets of those companies, only to then misappropriate that intellectual property and use it to fund Huawei’s business. These American companies thought they could build their products for a fraction of the price in China and increase margins. They didn't sto…

I would note that these companies were likely paying a Chinese company's American subsidiary for these services. Paying an American company—and such a subsidiary shell company, despite being purely a legal fiction, is still an American company—for its services, no matter who owns it, should not result in China being taught how to build your tech; and it's not the responsibility of other American corporations to ensur…

But a program has to request access to any resource from the OS so that the kernel is able to enforce those rules. That's not a good analogy to how individuals and companies in an open society interact with government and each other.

Re: The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

#178

Post by blackrock »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #115
wolco wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will keep singing and dancing and making music like they have always done. Most didn't make money from it. Sheet music changed that briefly, tapes/records/cds. Music = Copyright = money is a modern thing. Getting billions invested in anything won't happen without a return. If a company is limited to a short window before everyone can copy means less funding and more valueless throwaway products.

There is a happy balance to be had here. Patents as they exist today is often hindering innovation rather than promoting it. E.g. 3D printing really took off when 3D printing patents started expiring. The industry was stuck while patents where enforceable. In many industries patents are an innovation blocker. Companies often spend more money fighting patents trolls than they gain form having patents. Patens are incre…

Exactly. Like solar panels. It existed for decades, and languished in the labs, behind patent protections, until the patents expired. Then China came onto the scene, and innovated in mass production techniques to make it cheaper.

And now, solar energy just crossed a milestone, at 4 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with other energy sectors.

Re: The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

#179

Post by derefr »

Canada wrote: post #177
derefr wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would note that these companies were likely paying a Chinese company's American subsidiary for these services. Paying an American company—and such a subsidiary shell company, despite being purely a legal fiction, is still an American company—for its services, no matter who owns it, should not result in China being taught how to build your tech; and it's not the responsibility of other American corporations to ensur…

But a program has to request access to any resource from the OS so that the kernel is able to enforce those rules. That's not a good analogy to how individuals and companies in an open society interact with government and each other.

Corporations exist at a state's sufferance. If a Chinese company wants to create an American subsidiary that's going to predictably going to break the law, the state can (and, in fact, is probably legally obligated to) just not grant them a business license.

Or, after the fact, when the state realizes what is happening, they can dissolve the subsidiary's business license—just like with the DMCA, where the state can require local DNS resolvers to not resolve the domains of foreign companies found to be breaking local laws.

Re: The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering

#180

Post by blackrock »

frequentnapper wrote: post #142
blackrock wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tiring trope. It’s like how the music industry kept saying that people would no longer sing and make songs, because piracy would prevent them from doing so. As if there was no money to be made, and money was the only point of singing. As if piracy ever stopped people from singing for the past 10,000 years. Well, artists do make money from songs, by having concerts. They are selling the service and the exper…

It's not just about disregarding IP patents. It's about corporate espionage. Literally sending in spies/criminals to steal from a corporation.

Corporate espionage is a financial crime. If you have strategic secrets, then lock those damn secrets up!

Put heavy encryption on it. Keep it off the internet. Keep your computers air-gapped.

If you don’t do this, then sorry, this is your fault.

However, if someone else wants to compete with you, then they can just reverse engineer what you did. Any engineer competent enough can figure out the process details, by just working backwards. They don’t even need to bother looking at your source code or blueprints.

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