[ineedasername]

It's rather more trivial to leapfrog an existing technology when you're able to steal & learn from all of the IP it's based on and then target your R&D efforts accordingly. You don't have to suffer the organizational difficulties of sunk costs, path dependency, legacy systems, etc. So even if their equipment is more advanced, they still got there on the back of massive IP theft.

[ummonk]

Isn't this why most people on HN and in the tech community writ-large oppose patents in tech? Faster innovation happens when IP protections aren't holding back innovation.

[ineedasername]

I would myself advocate for looser patent grants. It seems wasteful that separate companies must redundantly spend resources treading down the same worn pathways. However, a system that circumvents that redundancy would require radically different & collaborative R&D arrangements to function equitably. In its absence, and in the presence of a system where single entities spend their own resources on development, IP theft is damaging. It assists in undercutting the bottom line and even driving out of business those companies that have been stolen from.

[liability]

A level playing field is more important than any hairbrained theories I might(do) have about IP law. Far worse than tech patents and copyright are tech patents and copyright that only apply to some companies but not others.

[JetSpiegel]

By this point, the US patent system can be considered a self inflicted wound. It's not like there have been decades of activists trying to take it down.

Maybe the US could have a cheap 5G vendor, if it had abolished patents decades ago, but now it's too late, the cat is out of the bag.

[chillacy]

Part of me hopes we will see some IP reform. I can’t imagine China sees the patent trolls and high price of drugs and thinks “yea that’s the system of the future”

[whenchamenia]

Are you inferring that we let their continued violation a system we both agreed to, while following it ourselves, slide, because it kinda resembles your philosophy from a hazy distance?

[chillacy]

If some of us were trying to reform a defective system in the first place, then yes we’d rather the world didn’t just finalize on hamstringing the pace of innovation for the future.