Comment by Bratmon
2 months ago
> China was playing industrial catch up. They didn't have to (for example) reinvent semiconductors from first principles. They will surely support some form of IP law once they have been firmly established at the cutting edge for a while.
That argument was in vogue about 20 years ago, but it fell out of favor when China passed us on the most important technologies without slowing down.
It is funny that some people are still carrying the torch for it after it's been so clearly disproven.
I agree they’ve surpassed the west (or at least stopped solely playing catch up) in some areas.
But surely you can see how your upthread math of “250 years in 40 years” has a mix of mostly catch-up and replication and a sliver of novel innovation at the extreme tail end of that 250 year span?
I agree that the China experiment hasn't empirically disproven IP law for the reasons you go in it. And this thread has hit the usual problem that "IP laws" are very broad and cover everything from basic common sense around trademarks to the lunacy like the Amazon one-click patent.
But at issue here is there are IP laws that slow progress it should sit with the proponents of those laws to demonstrate that they are effective. And I don't see how anyone could come up with evidence for that - it is nearly impossible to prove that purposefully and artificially retarding progress actually speeds progress up. There are a lot of other factors at play and one of them is probably a more important factor than IP law. Odds are that putting artificial obstacles in the way of making sensible commercial decisions just slows everything down for no gain.
And kills the culture, it is sad the amount of cultural artefacts in the 1900s that have basically been strangled by IP laws. My family used to be part of a community choir before the copyright lawyers got to it.
Copying and innovating are two very different things; most of China' s innovation has been incremental, to be kind. To keep up, the machine still needs to copy. Just like Japan did for decades until it became an industrial behemoth, so give them 10 more years and soon enough the western world will be doing the copying
well now that they're ahead we need to copy