

In China, plagiarization is an established business model - seanmcdirmid
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/china/in-china-plagiarization-is-an-established-business-model/360?tag=mantle_skin;content

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seanmcdirmid
This is a very big problem in China's startup scene; even Qihoo is very dodgy
and might not have a real business plan. Lee Kai Fu's Innovation Works are
trying to break this habit; they are starting fairly small and looking for
startups that could have YCombinator-style exits. I'm not aware of any other
incubators, at least in Beijing, this is still a very new thing.

Actually, there is a lot of money sloshing around in China looking for places
to go, given the opaque stock market, bad real estate market, and strict
capital controls. But just knowing that someone will probably rip off your
idea if you are even semi successful makes investing way too risky.

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astrodust
How long will it take for China to go through what the US experienced in the
1800s? Back then the American companies were the one pirating British designs,
technology, and copyright, making poor, inferior copies at first, only later
to find their own superior methods.

Even Japan followed this pattern of emulation and later refinement, and more
recently Korea has entered the stage where it's carving its own path, not just
making knock-offs but best-of-breed products in certain categories.

There's a point where you can no longer gain anything by stealing, but is this
because everyone you're competing against has already caught up, too, and now
you must go beyond in order to survive?

Maybe China's pressing need for solar, which other countries seem relatively
uninterested in, will be the start of that shift.

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carguy1983
You could have a thousand examples of the copy->innovate->invent development
cycle, but most Americans simply won't ever believe Chinese people can invent
things until it happens. Nevermind that Chinese people invented all sorts of
stuff - "what have you done for me lately?"

Just look at Japan - the thought that Toyota and Honda could ever make cars
better than Detroit used to be _completely_ outlandish... then it was Koreans.
Now it's Chinese (a Chinese car? HA! WHAT A JOKE!)

It's just racism, plain and simple.

The public perception curve for developing Asian countries in America goes
something like this: Ridicule -> Dismissal -> Contempt -> Acceptance ->
Reverence

Reflect upon where Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, China, all fall along this
curve, and where they were 10, 20, 30 years ago.

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pm90
I don't think its fair to call that attitude 'racist'. Anyone trying to
accomplish something great is ridiculed at one point or the other.

Anyway, the point about the copy->innovate->invent cycle is a very interesting
one. I'm guessing that the competence (and possibly, sales) that copying gives
to the copier builds their confidence which is then applied to solve genuine
problems, which leads to genuine progress.

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zby
Copying != plagiarism. Plagiarism is about pretending to be the original
author of the ideas - maybe there were some examples of that in the article -
but the bulk was about simple imitation without appropriating the authorship.

Conflating of copying and plagiarism is another attack on the Copy-left
culture (but it can also be effect of the authors stupidity).

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MaysonL
Plagiarism, dammit, the word is plagiarism! (I know that it's that way in the
original, but I don't feel like creating another fershlugginer account just to
bitch about diction.)

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rollypolly

      Tencent QQ boasts 721 million active accounts.
    

Numbers like that blows my mind. It's twice over the population of the US.

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sunkencity
In Europe everybody and their brother have their own struggling Groupon-clone.

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erben
"Baidu’s search engine is a copy of Google’s. " Not True. The founder of Baidu
received a US patent for search engine result page ranking back in 1996. So it
is not a simple copy.

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seanmcdirmid
Isn't web search quite an old field? It was around in 1996. Before that there
was AltaVista and Excite.

RankDex is definitely not as good as PageRank with respect to results, I'm
sure they have moved beyond that by now. I think what Baidu did copy outright
was Google's minimalistic look and feel, which is definitely not very Chinese
but appreciated nonetheless. Same with qqmail and gmail.

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bishnu
Every search engine did this, even Yahoo (search.yahoo.com).

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funthree
Relevant: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0>

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jsprinkles
There was a portion of Top Gear about this in the last series, where the
presenters travelled to China and showed off nearly exact copies of other
automakers' vehicles, such as BMW (who have sued the Chinese companies in the
past and lost in Chinese court). I don't believe this is limited to startups
and the Internet, and I think that the Chinese have just become very good at
copying things.

Best copy I can find: <http://vimeo.com/40226173>

