It's absolutely not a coincidence as IP theft is a primary demand of the US side at this time. The other being the overall imbalance.
Ironically, the bigger one is not arbitrary theft of IP, it's the requirement of many actors to willingly give up their IP when going into China and the de-facto closed market given all of the challenges foreign entities have to face.
Some arbitrary IP theft of XMen films and fashion labels could be tolerable, as could a permanent trade imbalance as America still wins huge surpluses even in an imbalanced exchange.
If it is, I would expect that to be glossed over by Bloomberg and others.
Not that it matters much to me. I’ve been designing my embedded components in such a way that even if I turned over source code it’s not of much use to anyone. You’d need to hack my device and my AWS instances to damage more than the one board you bought from me.
China stealing previous IP from me, made me learn a lesson and get better. Not that I don’t want to see someone pay for the theft, just that I’m realistic they won’t.
Out of curiosity, how did you find out about the IP theft?
Also, what are some actions (if there are any) that one can take if one learns of such IP theft? Are there any legal protections or is it simply a lost cause at that point?
Happy to answer, found out when our single Chinese dealer contacted us saying he's able to buy 1000 of our parts of the shelf at a place he knows. Got one it, saw it's a green circuit board and not the color we use. They had lifted my code from the micro using a voltage glitch and placed it on theirs. Works great... cause it's my code.
Basically I think the rule is don't even consider legal action unless you would be happy to dump $500,000 on it. We make much more than that on my product but for a variety of reasons wouldn't go down that route.
Longer answer on prevention is that if you're making a "dumb" device today, expect no reasonable protections if your price point keeps you in a standard microcontroller range. So, if you're using anything from PIC/AVR to Cortex M7, assume you will give firmware away somehow. In our case, the next product is BLE connected and will self-authenticate via our server, we looked at PSK and PKI, and found a way to do it cost effectively because of a unique scenario that it has to mate up to the part number on another product. Basically I can just watch the database for mismatched pairs and ban them from being used. Not perfect, and someone could make one bad unit for themselves, but not thousands.
No, and glad that's the case. I don't need the extra hassle! I make simple niche stuff.
But, it doesn't really matter, some Chinese guys saw they could make few dollars by knocking off my PCB, making it cheaper, using cheaper components, and copying my code. It's not like it was a $40,000,000 product line.
I tell people it's how I know I'm not completely shit. That the Chinese thought it good enough to clone/steal. It's how I know I've made it.
Obviously this is part of the negotiations going on, but, since it would reflect favorably on the current President, they'll gloss right over that. Big concessions and positive changes happening in our trade relations all over the world.
Yes, Chinese IP Theft is seen as a major problem by Trump's administration, and has been repeatedly and explicitly named as a reason to engage in tariff war.
How to reasonably hope and press for a satisfying solution to such massive state-sponsored IP theft is quite the open question.
