
Samsung's folding screen tech has been stolen and sold to China - RobLach
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-theft/index.html
======
neya
China's strategy has always been the same - wait for others to bleed in their
blood and money on R&D and when the technology is ripe and well working,
simply rip it off effortlessly and sell it a lower price point, most of the
times not even caring about quality/safety compromises.

We saw this with the Japanese bullet trains, we saw this with self driving
tech, and now it's display tech.

You could argue that the consumers benefit the most over time. But it's
definitely unfair to those who have dedicated their lives to researching these
technologies, only to see it get stolen and even re-licensed as China's own
(as what happened with the bullet trains).

The rest of the world should stop playing by Chinese's rules and be firm in
their stance like the US - Eg. if China doesn't enforce strict IP rules, then
people should seek alternatives and stop dealing with them. Even
India/Vietnam/Malaysia/etc. are better bets in comparison. Especially when
these schemes are sponsored by the Chinese government 9 times out of 10.

~~~
anonymous59u33
Wasn’t that Japan’s strategy in the 70s and South Korea’s in the 90s?

And I’m pretty sure that was the US strategy during the Industrial Revolution.
Or the European strategy when it came to stealing Chinese silk making methods.

I guess great powers steal alike.

~~~
MagnumOpus
Whataboutism. As always, two Wrongs don’t make a Right, and OP is not even
talking about the morality of it (everyone agrees it is immoral) but about
countermeasures.

~~~
Giorgi
Why is it immoral? It is knowledge and information must be free. Copyright and
patents etc are only holding mankind back.

~~~
neya
> Why is it immoral?

Theft is immoral. I can't just sneak into your home, steal your stuff and walk
away saying you're holding mankind back, can I? That's the analogy in the OP.

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
The argument is weather exclusivity to information and it's applications
should be something that can be owned and therefore be stolen.

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toss1
Samsung's $130 million investment over years, sold out to Chinese firms for
$14 million.

To the Chinese, theft of IP is just business as usual.

Every single firm I've personally encountered that has done biz in China has
either already had their IP stolen and sold in competition with it (or just
products sold out the back door w/o label), or fully expects that it would
happen and takes strong defensive strategies, e.g., sending pre-mixed
materials to China where they only do the final process.

This is not sustainable. While the West thinks that we were exploiting China
for it's cheap labor, the Chinese had a much longer range view -- they were
exploiting our myopic lust for short-term profits to get our most valuable
assets and gain long-term strategic advantage, both in both commercial and
military technology.

This is likely to go down as one of history's greatest strategic blunders.

I wonder if it has already gone too far for us to recover.

~~~
ggm
Which historically is what the USA did regarding European ipr in the
nineteenth century.

And Europe did to China in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Wedgewood
porcelain and Sevres...

~~~
oh_sigh
Do you see a difference between one person learning a process inside and out,
and reproducing it elsewhere, versus the work product of thousands of
engineers being stolen, far more information than a single human could ever
possibly know? The former is like watching a chef work and seeing how he cooks
a beef Wellington and doing it yourself, whereas the latter is like just
taking his whole recipe set.

~~~
CamperBob2
Recipes aren't protected by IP laws, which is a good thing, because if they
were, food would be worse.

There's a lesson there.

~~~
oh_sigh
Is it "don't read too closely into analogies"?

~~~
TeMPOraL
No. It's "IP protection is mostly a racket at this point, and instead of
promoting research & development, it often slows it down".

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reilly3000
That shit was stolen from Xerox circa 2004. They had working flexible monitor
prototypes back then. I worked as a phone rep for a little Xerox agency while
I was in college. I setup their first AdWords campaign because I hated cold
calling for selling toner refills and copier upgrade so very much. Xerox
corporate marketing site was advertising flexible monitors on their homepage -
a page I must have viewed 1200+ times. I can't find that URL on the wayback
machine, but I did find a contemporaneous article:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=1VRuoq7h2FcC&lpg=PA503&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=1VRuoq7h2FcC&lpg=PA503&ots=dTZxMvfhFz&dq=xerox%20flexible%20monitors&pg=PR3#v=onepage&q=xerox%20flexible%20monitors&f=false)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
They must have had insurmountable flaws if they were never visibly brought to
market.

~~~
adventured
Routinely failing to bring its best tech to market was a Xerox specialization.

~~~
jp555
Or maybe the screens would have retailed for something like $5000 each, in a
market with little to no demand (eg: consumer video conferencing prior to
smartphones).

There are no bad ideas, just bad timing.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _Or maybe the screens would have retailed for something like $5000 each_

That would be an insurmountable flaw, yes.

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kurthr
What is interesting is that it is the edge molding technology that has been
reported stolen... which means it's either really difficult or a side show to
all the other challenging parts of a foldable phone. I don't doubt that there
is a lot of mechanical engineering difficulty in getting a design like this to
MP and that one long difficult to manufacture pole could make it or break it
as a product.

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fspeech
This is a bad report as the reporter doesn't even bother finding out who the
accused are. See [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-samsung-
elec/south-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-samsung-elec/south-
korea-indicts-group-for-leaking-samsung-display-tech-to-chinese-firm-
idUSKCN1NY17K) The accused seller of technology is not some no name entity.
Toptec is a publicly traded equipment maker, which incidentally is South
Korean, not Chinese.

~~~
jayd16
The article says the buyers are Chinese not the seller.

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zachguo
Typical click-bait title. It's actually a korean company being sued.
[http://www.toptec.co.kr/](http://www.toptec.co.kr/)

This piece from Reuters includes more details:
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-samsung-
elec/south-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-samsung-elec/south-
korea-indicts-group-for-leaking-samsung-display-tech-to-chinese-firm-
idUSKCN1NY17K)

I guess someone in Samsung was just mad about the fact the world's first
foldable phone was made by a Chinese company.
[https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/11/5/18067116/r...](https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/11/5/18067116/royole-
flexpai-flexible-display-foldable-smartphone-tablet-pricing-features-release-
date)

~~~
jayd16
The article claims the buyers are Chinese. The seller is who is being sued
though. I suppose buying stolen goods is also illegal but yeah... it is odd
they focus on the nationality of the buyers.

~~~
izacus
It's not odd at all - once you understand the goal is to smear Chinese again.

Look at comments even in this topic - there's already ranting against China
here. Not even HNers cared enough to read about who stole what. The propaganda
objective has been reached.

~~~
javajosh
The tech was stolen by a Korean company and sold to a Chinese company. China
is famous for stealing Western tech. The "IP is evil" crowd on HN think this
is utopia. The rest (like me) think it's terrible. But the fact that Chinese
tech companies routinely steal tech is not in question, and it's not even
objectively a smear.

~~~
pas
I think copyright and IP in general is important and both extremes are bad.
Sadly this is one area where there are seemingly no easy solutions.

Fashion seems to cope well without IP protection except trademarks.

And arguably a lot of human endeavors could be done less adversarially (such
as pharma research, battery research, etc) but the lure of potential future
profit drives a lot of R&D there.

So maybe the solution is to reserve IP for things that seem to work well only
in a market race setup, but drop it to a few years in all other areas. And as
we set up X prizes, a regulator/committee could designate specialized R&D
races. (Or other kinds of IP incentives.)

Though who knows. Would Netflix produce new series/content without the 70
years of copyright? Well maybe not, but probably there wouldn't be a Netflix
either if all that content were just p2p available from the Library after 4-5
years.

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malandrew
If China continues down this path to stealing everyone's tech, it's in the
interest of all other countries to shut them out of the international market
until they play fair.

~~~
johnpmayer
Unless it turns out that strong protections for intellectual property rights
isn't correlated with the survival of a sovereign nation. Then it won't matter
how loudly the international community complains; China will just do its
thing. They're large enough and have the agricultural and industrial base to
weather isolation in the way that Iran/Russia do not.

~~~
trevyn
Survive? Sure. Thrive by global standards with trade restrictions? Not a
chance.

------
tehlike
One of the rationale behind trade wars.

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genericone
Now, were these two Chinese companies state-run companies, or is that just a
given based on the advanced technology involved?

~~~
sjroot
Are there any Chinese companies that don’t operate under the influence (if not
direct ownership) of their government?

~~~
izacus
Are there any companies that don't operate under influence of their
governments?

~~~
javajosh
Yes. In the US federal, state and local governments do not influence the
decisions of business leaders. Occasionally there are exceptions at largest
companies, like telecom and internet, but it is certainly true for small
business. Note that I would make a distinction between "regulation" and
"influence" in the following sense: 'don't dump waste into this lake' is a
regulation. Hey Bob, why don't you dump your waste into Joe's backyard - I
hate Joe and want to make his life miserable. That's influence. So are
hiring/firing decisions, strategic partnerships, and such. The Communist Party
in China is an authoritarian regime that accepts no legitimate limit on it's
influence.

------
cromwellian
I assume it is patented, so won't this matter only for the Chinese domestic
market? I assume internationally, they'd lose all their court cases, and
injunctions would block any Chinese companies trying to sell these components
to Western, Korean, or Japanese integrators.

~~~
jfktrey
Don’t be too quick to discount it. That’s a massive market.

~~~
cromwellian
True, but I also assume Samsung could take this case to the WTO and would get
other nations to file friendly supporting briefs, perhaps leading to trade
sanctions.

Eventually, the international community made be forced to make this expensive
enough that the costs outweigh the benefits.

~~~
gruez
china has been doing this for years. what makes you think that this time will
be any different?

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PHGamer
gotta love good ol corporate espionage. at this point companies are going to
have to act like military.

~~~
thefounder
They already do that. On WallStreet they've been doing it for years(i.e hire
ex MI6/Mossad/CIA). I don't see why it wouldn't happen in other sectors.

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joejerryronnie
All this stolen tech and trade war stuff is going to look quaint when the US
and China engage in full scale military conflict 10 years from now.

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NicoJuicy
Here I go again, I see the fear of China rising:

Support for "Made in India 2025" seems to be the only viable alternative.

Why? See my other post below

~~~
optimiz3
> Why? See my ( very recent) comment history.

No one is here for a homework assignment. Please explain yourself to add to
the discussion.

~~~
NicoJuicy
> I'll repeat it again, my solution would be: Support for Made in India 2025.
> Greed won't disappear, but you can shift the balance to a more western
> friendly country.

They are already destroying a lot of countries. They borrow money to them, so
the Chinese can build their infrastructure. But there are almost no locals
involved, so all the artificial inflation goes to China. The belt is just an
excuse for colonizing the world ( or at least the harbors, strategic airports
that they themselves have built, see Sri Lanka, they are the first to comply).

I think a lot of those countries that built a dam with Chinese money forget
that maintenance costs a lot also. Reference: FIFA football stadiums

Ps. Feel free to share your concern

