> In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.
I think it's at least a little interesting that "Intellectual property", like property in general, isn't a natural phenomenon. The very concept of property is a social construct we enforce on each other, supposedly for our shared benefit. This also means its existence has to live within the governmental system, and therefore be subject to sovereignty claims. "Intellectual Property" can therefore only be said to be "stolen" within a nation, by that nations own laws, or between nations following bilateral sovereign nation agreements.
What I'm basically saying is that I'm not sure China has agreed to uphold American style "Intellectual Property", and as such, I'm not sure you can actually claim them to have "stolen" any "Intellectual Property".
A thing that could be interesting particularly for hn folks: in China, you can sue entities for open source license violation citing American-origin licenses like GPL, and win. There are many such cases. So one can potentially sue e.g. Onyx over their Linux kernel usage and stop their violation. This hasn't happened probably simply because no one cared enough.
IP is only copied, not stolen. It goes both ways -- Tesla learned how to efficiently build and operate their factories from the Chinese. And as Elon always says, manufacturing is 1000x as hard as design and prototyping.
Using this definition, identities are only copied, and not stolen.
Learning from the Chinese is entirely different than using operatives to take the corporate secrets from lets say the biggest steel company in the world, and then driving them out of business within a few years.
If this is the world you want to live in, fine. Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal oprecourse.
> Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal recourse.
To be fair, that is the schadenfreude. Large corporations have been copying works of little people for ages. They only started crying about 'IP theft' when someone bigger (China) started doing the same to them, and to make it worse, most of the corps willingly handed the IP over because they wanted cheap exploitable labor.
Tesla's first purpose built car factory was built in China using mostly local expertise. Their Berlin factory is basically a copy of their Chinese factory. Grohmann Automation was to super automate their factories, which is why the Model 3 roll out was such a disaster and which they abandoned in favour of conventional car manufacturing techniques.
All intellectual property is stolen because all ideas are related.
Similar principal to "All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers" - (That quote is from a french archbishop, not a communist)
A "bleeding heart" world that took such statements seriously would be infinitely better than what we have today. But we can't have that because book-burners, luddites and related ilk hate the fact that "information wants to be free"
In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.