[prolikewh0a]

So?

This is just rich people whining about someone else being able to make their products much cheaper. The whole world benefits from this, just not already super rich patent & trademark holders who are anti-competitive & hurt consumers.

Can anyone even tell me a negative that isn't just capital?

[shrewduser]

By that logic why have IP at all why bother protecting investments in new technology and inventions. the system isn't perfect but you're saying that there's no merit in it whatsoever.

[shittyadmin]

This distinctly isn't IP in any real way - it's not trademarkable or patentable.

[ridgeguy]

There's more to IP than trademarks and patents. You skipped over trade secrets.

[thaumasiotes]

So, the purpose of granting patents is that companies will take the temporary protection and put their techniques into the public record, preventing the technological loss that occurs when the only people who know a secret accidentally die.

What's the idea behind legal protection for trade secrets?

[ridgeguy]

Legal protection of trade secrets gives the trade secret owner the right to sue if someone steals the secret.

So if employees of Coca-Cola conspire to steal the (trade) secret formulation for Coke, the company can sue them for damages. There can be criminal offenses as well.

Trade secrets are used in situations where there's a secret (like some manufacturing process) that can't easily be reverse-engineered from the product. In that case, the owner can keep the secret as long as they wish. No patent to expire, no transfer of the IP to the public domain. For as long as the secret can be kept.

Of course, there's no legal protection from reverse-engineering a trade secret. Somebody who RE'd Coke's formula would not only be free to use it but could patent it as well. The patent holder might even be able to sue Coke for patent infringement.

[shittyadmin]

Because trade secrets are not a respected form of IP.

- Patents serve to provide a temporary shelter for monopolizing new ideas and methodologies to allow them to be developed

- Trademarks serve to guarantee consumers can differentiate products and their producers

- Copyright serves to allow people to make money from creative works while distributing them widely.

Trade secrets? Trade secrets allow a company to monopolize a market with no benefit to the public in the long run. They deserve exactly zero legal protections.

[ridgeguy]

The U.S. patent office disagrees with you and notes that the U.S is obligated to protect trade secrets [1].

The Coca-Cola company and defendants Williams and Dimson might differ, as well [2].

[1] https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/international-...

[2] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-11th-circuit/1234095.html

[prolikewh0a]

There is no merit. It's for capital only. Almost everything should be public domain.

What real negative effect does the OP article have on society? None, it's actually likely beneficial, just again not for the already super wealthy.

[hueving]

>What real negative effect does the OP article have on society?

All capital intensive innovation (i.e. anything hardware related) effectively comes to a full stop. The potential returns on capital are the only reason people invest in these companies in the first place.

It takes a shocking amount of mental gymnastics to think billions are going to be spent trying new technologies if second comers can just steal the working result for free.

[kodablah]

> There is no merit. It's for capital

Sounds like a self-contradictory position to the vast majority that consider capital as merit.

[booleandilemma]

This is just rich people whining about someone else being able to make their products much cheaper.

Stealing is stealing though, isn't it? Regardless of who benefits.

[Nasrudith]

It is infringement not theft despite the extensive rhetoric to conflate the two. If something is stolen they no longer have it. If something is infringed then it is only their exclusivity undermined.

Say you own the Batmobile from a particular Batman movie and all rights to its reproduction. If make an exact copy of your Batmobile you would still have it in your garage. The value might be undermined some because it is a substitute good but only one was involved in the filming.

Infringement may still be wrong (it varies by circumstances just like how breaking a baptismal font to save a boy from drowning isn't simple sacrilegious vandalism) but it isn't theft.

[ta1234567890]

Unfortunately not. If that was the case, pretty much every politician in the world would be in jail, same as all the bank execs that made the 2008 crisis happen and probably a bunch more powerful people. But it turns out if you are powerful or influential enough, you'll just get away with stealing, and maybe you'll call it something else while you are at it too.

[prolikewh0a]

What are they stealing? Ideas? Thoughts?

[FullyFunctional]

Is this a serious question? They are stealing results of very long and expensive R&D, commonly know as Intellectual Property, or "IP". Producing this locally would require a sufficient mass of experience talent and lots of time and money. It might not even be possible to catch up.

The fact that this is being stolen from Micron who presumably weren't blind to the value of their IP make it all the more frighting. None of the companies I have worked for in the past few decades would have had any chance of resisting a motivated thief as locking down knowledge runs counter to fostering innovation.

[pzh]

Stealing these results is a negative to society because it prevents the inventor from making profit on their inventions and from recovering their R&D costs. It is bad because it discourages companies from investing in R&D and from making advances in science and technology.

[claudiawerner]

This makes me question whether it is actually a negative to society, then; should we, as a society, rely on the incentive of profit to push technology forward, if this incentive is such a fickle thing? If it depends on keeping information secret? One of the favourite arguments of the liberals and capitalists is that the free market is efficient, but where is the efficiency in companies and individuals needing to re-create the same R&D over and over again?

[scarejunba]

Usually, HN’s position on this is that it isn’t stealing since both parties now have access to it. No one is being deprived of the blueprints.

[prolikewh0a]

>They are stealing results of very long and expensive R&D, commonly know as Intellectual Property, or "IP". Producing this locally would require a sufficient mass of experience talent and lots of time and money. It might not even be possible to catch up.

Can you tell me how stealing these results is actually a negative to society? Is it just a negative to already extremely wealthy individuals? I'm finding no negative here and nobody is really giving me anything other than capital.

[hueving]

We wouldn't have modern computers if it weren't for IP laws. The semiconductor industry would have collapsed and stopped investing fab research if they could have just waited and immediately stolen any better design.

I suggest you read up on "tragedy of the commons" and maybe some basic game theory to understand why there needs to be an incentive to invest in R&D for a company to do so.

[toomuchtodo]

If capital is required for innovation, and capital won't invest when that innovation can't provide a return, it is a negative to society.

[prolikewh0a]

Capital is not required for innovation. See Open Source, Cuba's CimaVax, the Soviet space program.

[pzh]

The “ideas and thoughts” that you mention are not one-off ideas that somebody came up with in 10 minutes. The big concern is that what is stolen is ideas that are the result of decades of investment in R&D with significant monetary value. Just because manufacturing can be done on the cheap doesn’t mean that coming up with the invention didn’t take a 100x investment.

[Jach]

IP isn't remotely valued proportional to its investment, and a lot of highly valued IP doesn't take such efforts to create. Indeed in some cases how could it, if the innovation requires a random walk through the design space? The first company that found it might have just gotten unlucky with a path that took decades of trial and error when a different path might have found it sooner or cheaper (but no one else was looking, or were on yet another path).

In thinking over IP reform (and avoiding getting upset about China stealing it) it'd be better to question the notion that the IP is centrally important rather than phrase things just in terms of rich vs non-rich people... A starting question: even if you know all the written details about X, can you still go make your own X? Following up, for the Xs you can, can you do it in a shorter time frame than someone who already has X can develop a better X' that keeps their ROI number positive?

The current top comment on this page posits that the answers to these for many international businesses were "sometimes, no":

> International companies in a rush to get access to the largest single market in the world have freely given away their IP, because they didn't think the Chinese could ever catch up.

I don't think this logic has changed, but instead international companies have stopped innovating as much, which allowed China to catch up. (The US did the same thing to Europe.) They want to rest on their laurels for longer instead of innovating more, and IP distribution (from sharing, theft, expiration, or otherwise) does put a timer on how long you can rest.

[prolikewh0a]

And now that research is available to society as a whole to benefit them in an open and likely now cheap way.

Some already super rich people and companies lost money, but so what? I'm sure they'll be able to put food on their families tables until the heat death of the universe.

[pzh]

It’s not as simple and clear cut as you make it out to be. The IP theft actually destroys many small businesses and companies that were trying to disrupt an industry by coming up with something original. There are many cases like this one: https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/23/technology/business/america...