But they may also host unwanted or even malicious software, firmware, or hardware—and the buyer may not know the difference, or even know what to look for.
Alternatively, the clones are often the ones which will omit the user-hostile DRM and such. Thus you get HDMI splitters which don't actually re-encrypt HDCP, DVD players which don't implement region restrictions or the "unskippable" bits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_operation_prohibition ) , Androids with unlocked bootloaders by default, etc.
Of course, to an organisation like the IEEE, who have always appeared to be pro-DRM, pro-IP, pro-copyright, that would probably be considered "malicious"...
The whole safety/security argument, while true, I think is somewhat overblown and these days increasingly used to justify an authoritarian agenda.
I think the IEEE is just ethical. Faithfully build the thing you're paid to build. It's probably not fair to call the encryption free splitter an HDMI splitter. If you build it, call it something else so you don't dilute the standard.
Of course, i don't have a lot of experience with IEEE, they may actually be super pro-DRM, and my opinion could be swayed.
> I think the IEEE is just ethical. Faithfully build the thing you're paid to build.
The important questions in business ethics are not whether you faithfully build the thing you're paid to build or build it unfaithfully, but whether that thing ought to be built at all.
DRM and DRM circumvention tools can fall on both sides of that divide, it's not an easy question.
I deeply empathize with people who've had their IP stolen by offshore entities.
But, especially with big manufacturers like Cisco (mentioned in the article), a lot of the problems are of their own doing. There is an ancient proverb: as you sow, so shall you reap.
So, what the fuck did those big companies think would happen to their designs once they shipped them off to China to manufacture? Or, even better, after they subcontracted the actual design of their products to offshore entities?
Surprise ... surprise ... surprise ... there are plenty of smart engineers and plenty of greedy capitalists to be found all over Asia. Why did you give them such a head start with your products? The stories are legion of factories making legitimate products during the day and counterfeits of those very same products at night.
Cloning electronics is hard compared to consumer goods. Why is it that a Coach handbag can be purchased so cheaply in China? Maybe because Coach does their manufacturing in Asia? Maybe because if a handbag can be made in Asia for $50, there are plenty of people who would be happy to purchase it for $100 instead of the $1000 that Coach is selling it for?
Everyone posting comments either defending clones or saying they are not bothered by them (or that they are cool because they foster innovation) has obviously never taken everything they owned, quit their job and even gone as far as mortgaging their family home to develop a product in pursuit of an idea.
Do that. Then come back and tell me how it feels to have some fucker in China clone your product.
I've had the experience of having a company out of Korea do a product that copied 75% of one of ours and introduce it into the US at half the price. Nearly fucking killed my business after investing nearly a million dollars and a year of R&D.
The "D" part is much easier than the "R" part, which is where reverse engineering has a huge advantage. You do all the "R" and then they copy and do some "D".
Not only that, you also identified a market opportunity for a product, which is massive. Ideas are worth shit. Opportunities are worth gold.
The answer is very, very simple once you've taken a loan out on your family home to finance the development of a product that is then stolen.
Everything is academic and sterile from almost any other perspective.
Government sponsored theft --which is what's happening in China-- is a massive destructive force. It is good in China because it brings in billions of dollars from all around the globe. That's why the Chinese government doesn't do a thing about it. They "sponsor" it do the extent that inaction becomes indistinguishable from sponsorship.
And what about when you've taken a loan out on your family home to finance the development of a product, but are then ruined by the incumbent oligopoly's abuse of their patent monopoly to put your prices through the roof and never improve their products?
I can write emotionally-charged anecdotes too, see. The question is whether the benefits outweigh the negatives. Everything is exaggerated, politicized bullshit from almost any other perspective.
I have competed with multi-billion dollar multinationals from my garage with 0.001% of their budget on hand. Does bad shit happen? Sure.
The topic you seem to want to discuss is valid and should be discussed. Stop trying to make it equivalent to IP theft and cloning from China. Two very different things. If you can understand the differences then there's a conversation to be had.
To amplify your point, cloning in the sense used in this discussion is intellectual property theft.
It doesn't matter whether it deliberately attempts to pass itself off as the genuine article (i.e. a counterfeit item) or attempts to capitalize on the name brand by making the article visually almost identical (e.g. Sharpie vs Shoupie pens - a knockoff).
A sobering fact is that about $653 billion worldwide is lost from counterfeit goods[1]. The FBI takes this position[2]:
> legitimate businesses lose billions of dollars in revenue and suffer damaged reputations, consumer prices go up, the U.S. and global economies are robbed of jobs and tax revenue, product safety is reduced, and sometimes lives are even put at risk.
As much as I am not a fan in particular of the FBI, I agree with this statement. In fact, the USA is hit the hardest by far, losing $225 billion annually to counterfeiting[3].
Bottom line: a person or company should be able to profit from their ideas, research and development, productization, licensing and marketing, without having these things stolen by others and used to make money off their sweat.
Exactly. I have, in my mind, this image of a river of money flowing from the US to China for counterfeit goods. They results in the destruction of businesses and jobs as well as taking a significant amount of money out of our economy and into theirs.
That depends on a very narrow definition of it. Quite often smaller European companies get destroyed because some US megacorp steals the IP and manages to stall the legal process until the small company goes bankrupt.
This is true. I happens here in the US just as well. Yet this is a different issue.
In one case you have a massive number of companies in China stealing IP and copying products while their government looks the other way.
In the other case you have an asymmetric legal situation. Even a small company can bring a mega corp to it's knees due to IP theft. Patents are powerful things when used correctly.
Yet, we are talking about very different things here. China --a nation-- has a massive product cloning and IP theft industry. This is happening at an astounding scale under a government that almost encourages it.
There are plenty of stories of Kickstarter projects that run into clones before their funding completes. This can be devastating for an entrepreneur and their small company. It all points back to China.
If you visit the links I posted, you will see that other countries suffer, too.
I don't deny that some US businesses have predatory practices, and that is wrong, but it doesn't come close to the wholesale IP theft we are seeing, and doesn't make it any less wrong.
If you claim it's a "huge part of the US economy", you should back this up with some evidence.
Historically, it's been a common strategy for emerging economies to rise up through that process. Even the US did it at one time, and it's probably a big reason why it has such a strong IP position today.
Risk taking is a necessary part of progress. Without it the very computers we are using to communicate would not exist.
Risk taking doesn't need to be dampened, it needs to be encouraged and protected.
China is getting richer by the day by being thieves. Sure, they do make a lot of legitimate products there. Yet, their theft "cartels" bring in hundreds of billions of dollars into their economy at the detriment of the economies they attack using such techniques.
> Do that. Then come back and tell me how it feels to have some fucker in China clone your product.
I'm sure that would hurt, but also am deeply convinced that the tendency to overprice ideas/products just because the western economics says it's the right thing when there's still demand, is what creates opportunities for cloners. Ask yourself why we don't see people around photocopying physical newspapers to sell them at half the price and you get the answer to why other products are cloned.
Go build a company and have your products stolen. Then you'll understand.
Go build a product in a competitive market and then have someone with zero business experience it's overpriced.
Here, I'll help you. You don't even need to make physical products:
Create a website that will host authoritative articles about, I don't know, auto repairs.
You will personally write all the articles.
You devote a whole year to researching and writing them. You also hire a graphic artist to create illustrations for every single article. Let's say each article takes an hour of your time (if you are really good at it) and half an hour of the artist time. In the aggregate each article cost you about $200 to produce, in time and hard costs.
At the end of twelve months you publish your website with 1,000 fresh articles that cost you no less than $200K to produce. You devoted a whole year to this, so one could very well argue there's an opportunity cost associated with the success or failure of this website. I'll place that at $100K. You invested $300K to launch this site. And then someone comes along and tells you it's overpriced.
That aside, as soon as you launch I hire a bunch of people on Fiverr to take your articles and modify them just enough to maintain the value of your research yet look and feel a little different. I pay $10 per article to steal and change your product. I invest a total of $10,000 and can probably get the work done inside of a month.
I now launch a new website to compete with yours. I can spend a few tens of thousands of dollars in marketing and outrank you with what effectively is your own content. I stole a year of your hard work and investment and made your website irrelevant by throwing money at marketing. Money you don't have because you spent it all researching and developing your product.
That is, in many ways, what is happening with the cloning of products out of China. There's nothing whatsoever good about it no matter how hard someone might want to try and distort reality to put lipstick on that pig.
Please don't get lost in the weeds and see the hypothetical for what it is: A mechanism through which one can gain understanding of the issue being discussed.
remember that cheap clones also foster innovation, by spreading tools that would be completely inaccessible to people without money, that's how computers revolutionized the world.
With some cheap fake arduinos, cheap fake Saleae, and cheap fake FTDI chips, you can start prototyping while others are still counting their money to buy a $35 arduino. When you've established your working capital, you will buy brand-name stuff.
Arduino is an example of open hardware. You can't sell a branded Arduino clone, but you are perfectly entitled take the schematic, build a clone board and sell it for peanuts. Fake FTDI is more of a problem because of the recent debacle where the drivers wouldn't work with counterfeit chips.
I've often had Sparkfun boards fabbed via Oshpark, rather than buy and pay for expensive shipping from the States.
Making a cheap clone isn't really morally problematic to me. If a consumer has more options AND can make effective judgments about the level of quality they're buying, then consumers are probably happy. What is problematic is deceptive labeling/marketing such as saying "why yes, this is of course a genuine pacemaker".
And to be clear, the article is talking about that last kind. I think its terminology is rather off: I'd consider a "clone" to be something built to be similar, maybe compatible, but clearly marketed as its own thing, and the subject of the article would be "counterfeits." But for some reason they're using "clones" to describe stuff that's passed off as the original.
They don't have to make counterfeits to meet that goal though. For example, there are USB to serial chips like the ch340 that are genuine, but still cheap.
There's a certain amount of software out there that requires the non-standard bit banging features of the FTDI adapters. The cloners have done a really good job of implementing this (works better than the real thing, apparently).
My cheap fake Saleae is what convinced me to buy a real one a year later. (Logic is a lot nicer than Sigrok.) I'm mostly a software/IT guy, and EE is new to me, and I did not have a large starting budget.
Turns out it's a blast, but I quite simply would not have been able to buy what I needed to outfit a decent electronics bench if it wasn't for eBay and Shenzhen.
There have been many cases recently where counterfeit goods made it into genuine distribution channels, sometimes even being distributed by the original maker itself.
On the first pair I called it correctly... but I don't think I could have called it correctly without knowing there was only one fake.
What if there were no fake, or both were fake, and they lied to see if anyone called them on it? Honestly all I was basing it on was the components being SLIGHTLY off (bad QC).
That's why I couldn't pick out which of the second set were a fake, sure there were differences, but there wasn't any visually obvious detriment to those differences.
> That's why I couldn't pick out which of the second set were a fake, sure there were differences, but there wasn't any visually obvious detriment to those differences.
Cheap knockoffs quite often skimp on laser engraving, which seems to be the case here too.
I think fake detection could occur by including a sim card of authenticity. I guess you'd need to insert the sim into something to authenticate. As long as sim cards aren't cracked, the manufacturer doesn't lose their private key, or customers aren't convinced to authenticate against the wrong signature, 1 sim/signature per device should work.
Incorporating plant DNA is certainly an interesting approach to the problem. The chip or PCB fingerprinting methods make me slightly concerned about potential privacy implications. Would the fingerprint be shared among a batch of chips/PCBs or would each piece be uniquely fingerprinted?
Not exactly fake hardware, but also quite commone- reused hardware- you desolder SOCs from defunct old scrap hardware and reapply them to "new" or "faked" hardware.
Suddenly the invetible bitrot - by material migration or allready done flash-writes sets in way earlier.
Alternatively, the clones are often the ones which will omit the user-hostile DRM and such. Thus you get HDMI splitters which don't actually re-encrypt HDCP, DVD players which don't implement region restrictions or the "unskippable" bits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_operation_prohibition ) , Androids with unlocked bootloaders by default, etc.
Of course, to an organisation like the IEEE, who have always appeared to be pro-DRM, pro-IP, pro-copyright, that would probably be considered "malicious"...
The whole safety/security argument, while true, I think is somewhat overblown and these days increasingly used to justify an authoritarian agenda.