
 A Kickstarter idea could be on sale in China before fundraising has finished - panabee
https://qz.com/771727/chinas-factories-in-shenzhen-can-copy-products-at-breakneck-speed-and-its-time-for-the-rest-of-the-world-to-get-over-it?src=twitter
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merricksb
Discussed 4 months ago (142 points/57 comments):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724096](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724096)

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dingdingdang
Actually part of me is thrilled with this development, there are so many of
the cool Kickstarter projects that fail due to lack of scale and economy - if
Chinese factories can be bothered producing functional versions of these
projects this is great from consumer perspective!

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godelski
While that is cool from the customer side it also reduces incentive to
innovate. The best innovations are usually simple. An example being that cell
phone selfie stick. Easy to copy once you come up with the idea. Since we live
in a capitalized world we have certain protections for inventors, patents.
This gives the inventor time to attempt to capitalize on their invention. If
they cannot then it goes into the public domain. If the patent is ignored this
allows for a much larger company to squash competition (a necessity in our
economic model).

This essentially means you have to keep your products secret and not advertise
them. Pushing you back to the old school method of funding with angels and
VC's. No longer having crowd sourcing (which can be a major benefit to
inventors, not having to give up equity).

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cyberferret
I've always wondered how frequently this happened.

While I do enjoy the videos and lengthy posts about the backstory, inspiration
and early design ideas on a lot of Kickstarter/Indiegogo projects, I've always
wondered if someone else could pick up the inspiration and run with it.

I appears that the barriers to actually executing an idea (which is usually
the excuse for ideas not ever coming to fruition) get lower and lower every
day, with offshoring options, and manufacturers willing to create one off
prototypes at very low prices.

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joantune
On one side, 'OpenSource' even on hardware is needed, on the other, if you
have no benefit for the one that innovates, you end up with less incentives
for innovation.

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em3rgent0rdr
Well open source software seems to be continually inovating, so we shouldn't
expect open source hardware to not.

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joantune
thing is, this is ripping out someone else's ideas. One thing is to donate the
software/hardware, the other is to steal it and call it open source

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jeandejean
What is the most striking: the celerity of Chinese copycats or the extremely
high demand for selfish sticks?

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spodek
The problem seems to be Kickstarter, in this case, for misleading underfunded
people without access to essential resources into believing they could compete
with people who have more resources.

Or for people to believe they could post ideas and the world would just wait
for them. It doesn't sound like the guy got patent protection for his device.

You could argue that patent protection would promote more innovation, but they
introduce other costs that stifle it, like paying lawyers and time to write
and file patents.

This doesn't seem a problem with China but a property of capitalism. Just
having an idea doesn't guarantee you get the value of it. Ultimately you have
to deliver value to someone for them to pay you for it.

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jstandard
I don't think a patent would have helped here. Patents take years to be
granted (if they are granted), around $7-$10k to file unless you're
experienced in writing them, and then you would be attempting to sue
internationally against a country which doesn't recognize your patent.

Kickstarter might be able to do better with user risk education, I'm not
familiar with their onboarding enough to know what they do. In this specific
case, I think it's mostly on the entrepreneur to recognize the tradeoffs when
using a low cost service in a country where the rule of law is weaker or
enforced in ways you don't understand. Sometimes, despite that research, you
still get ripped off.

What happened, if true, is unfortunate. Hopefully publicized cases like these
will lead prototypers to make better decisions.

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raverbashing
Or, maybe, people "Kickstart" an existing product then just get their brand on

It seems to be something that happens frequently (amongst other
kickstarter/related sites scams)

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kensai
Could we also say that "some Chinese* developers clone software ideas from
Product Hunt"?

*although they can be of any nationality

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reustle
Or Europeans :)

[https://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-
samwer](https://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer)

