471–480 of 565 posts
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Intellectual property is a western invention as I understand it. I don't think China agrees that you can own an idea like we assert that we do.
China certainly did agree in various ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_in_China
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Terrible, such actions are only tolerable when the US do it via moral operations like operation paperclip.
How is that related? Are you actually saying that the US was being unfair to Germany by stepping on their IP? Of all the criticisms of that program I’ve never heard “but won’t somebody think of the Germans” lol. Also, two wrongs don’t make a right, and 1945 was 2-3 scientific revolutions ago
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It's not theft, it's copyright infringement and is very morally and practically different from theft. The range of circumstances in which it is morally acceptable are MUCH broader.
There are situations where developers emailed/cloud uploaded/took hard drive of code they had been working on when he left the organization and were looking at prison sentences for theft...not copyright infringement. They didn't even give it to someone or reuse it somewhere. Just the fact of trying to keep it when they left as illegal. All that to say that in some circumstances taking source code is considered theft.
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Would the world definitely be a worse place if the laws were amended to say "any software developer owns equal IP rights to the code they create as part of their jobs along with the company, so either party can do anything they want with it"? I'm not sure it would - although it disadvantages the companies compared to the current situation, it's not like they would choose to stop hiring devs to work for them - and tha…
It massively disadvantages the company. Why pay for software to be built that can just be taken by your software engineers, who form a new company and run a competing product?
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My hair stood on end both times he did this. Holy crap that's some massive legal liability.
I got into this with another set of engineers on Reddit where I discovered there’s a subculture of engineers who don’t believe you can’t actually own code and apparently take a copy of their employers source code repository everytime they switch jobs. Edit: Updated “can actually own code” to “can’t actually own code”
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This feels like the debate between tax evasion and tax avoidance. What the engineer did here going to an IP lawless place is more like tax avoidance. It has a bad smell but he legally exploited a loophole in the international IP system if I understood correctly. Sort of migrating to a tax haven to avoid taxes. Unless there is something explicitly stated in your contract banning you from taking the "know-how" in your…
It's less that it's explicitly legal, and more that it's not enforced or enforceable there right?
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How is that related? Are you actually saying that the US was being unfair to Germany by stepping on their IP? Of all the criticisms of that program I’ve never heard “but won’t somebody think of the Germans” lol. Also, two wrongs don’t make a right, and 1945 was 2-3 scientific revolutions ago
I mean its still pretty hypocritical - the US is happy to take in literal Nazi war criminals to stay as a super power, yet they start clutching pearls if a developing country tries and poach some talent with IP knowledge.
Perhaps that is an American cultural tradition that China is unlikely to respect.
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This isn't that. This is engineers deliberately taking tech to somewhere where they know IP laws won't be enforced. It's not like I'm saying they can learn calculus here and then go to China and use calculus to design things. It's that I'm saying they design a very specific thing, a very specific way, for hire, then go make that exact specific thing, that same specific way. If it were in any other country but China,…
If you learn how to build a castel with a very specific era look and feel as an architect, would you not then be likely hired to build a similar castel elsewhere?
But I've never built the exact same castle, with the exact same Floorplan, with the exact same plans. That's what I'm highlighting that I've seen several times.
A cool aside, I love this song by Watsky called "cardboard castles". Having done this for 20 years (build "cardboard castles") I identify with it.