
How a Chinese Startup Made $50 Million in 3 Months by Stealing US and UK IP - chinatechconf
https://chinatechconfidential.blogspot.com/2019/12/how-chinese-startup-made-50-million-in.html
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exabrial
The concept of strong IP doesn't really exist in their society. They look at
is and scratch their head and think why are they making it so hard?

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sectiondetail
This is specifically why SpaceX rarely patents anything. From a 2012 Wired
article [0], Musk is on record as saying "We have essentially no patents in
SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents,
it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe
book."

[0] [https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-
qa/](https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/)

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paulryanrogers
Which is sad in part because trade secrets can hold back healthy competition
for generations. At least with reasonably limited patents society as a whole
can learn without resorting to spying, leaks, or expensive reverse
engineering.

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brianwawok
Parents can also be used to stifle competition.

I am not convinced the no patent world advances any slower than the patented
and heavily litigated world.

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jdsnape
The article mentions that the app has thousands of books 'scanned from
physical copies'...while reading books to our kid I've been struck by how many
are printed in China so I wonder if getting access to the digital assets used
in the printing process would be easier than scanning the produced books?

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chinatechconf
Hello! Author here. The company in question does not have connections with the
publishing industry. It is basically a 1-1 tutoring platform gone rogue.

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jdsnape
ah ok - quite a lot of effort must have gone into copying these books then I
guess!

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CTOSian
This is nothing "new", the real money is from printed books, not only China,
Turkey too: ESL publishers buy books from eg. Greece then scan > photoshop to
translate Greek to Turkish > publish, original publishers have no idea as its
an off-the-net business, definitely the language barrier helps those kind of
business.

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chinatechconf
Cool! How do you know about this happening in Turkey? The novelty here is
probably in the online component and with Apple app store approval.

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zupreme
Yet Scribd remains.....

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powerapple
Yes, very similar to Scribd user uploaded content. I like Scribd, but I mainly
use it for audio books,

On the other hand, publishers will not chase unless they see money. It is a
new app, maybe it can grow into something valuable they publishers will be
interested in getting some money. These books will be too expensive to sell
anyway.

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zupreme
In reality, technology has moved beyond globally enforceable copyright
protection for the written word.

That ship has sailed. New revenue streams, like audiobooks and companion
videos/software/etc will become essential, if they are not already.

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foooooooooooooo
surprising that apple app store doesn't do much DD on content apps, esp. from
a chinese app developer

