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by prewett
1651 days ago
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I'm no fan of Chinese IP theft, but it is not true that the British did nothing to protect their IP. When Francis Lowell [1] went to Britain to learn about cotton mills, he could find nothing printed, and I believe it was illegal to take notes out of the country. At any rate, he was searched when he left, but he had studied the machinery and memorized plans for it. When he got back, he built the first textile mill in the US. I think publishers in the young United States, having no copyright laws on sheet music, blatantly copied sheet music from British publishers. However, I'm not able to find a source on that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Cabot_Lowell |
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Did he? There's no evidence for that.
To me, it sounds like a smart Harvard grad just figured out a few missing pieces required to get textile manufacturing going. Wasn't his first time doing industrial processes at scale either: he successfully ran a distillery before that.
It's also interesting to remember that it happened at a time England was in open war against the United States. It's not really the same right now with Chinese companies trying to get into the US market and vice versa. Both countries claim to be allied but there's a clear disregard for the laws of one particular country!
Maybe a better analogy to what Francis Lowell did would be operation paperclip. The US did steal technology from Germany at the end of the war [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip