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.
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.