POS on the net

[droxy]

If you bought a book from barnes and nobel, check this out:

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/10/24/barnes-noble-pin-pad-credit-card/?utm_source=Naked+Security+-+Sophos+List&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=e0fce13f42-naked%252Bsecurity

LOL- some of my industry drama. 
Huawei has been ripping off designs and intellectual property as far back as 1995,

Comments

[foxestacado]

When I met with some business people in China, I was talking to them about their business, and I realized they had a business partner, left the business partner, copied their technology, and is selling the technology themselves. I asked, "Isn't that copyright violation?" And they looked me in the eye and said, "Copyright law doesn't apply to us because we're not in the United States. And even if it did, we can't stop because everyone else is doing it."

The point is, China is not enforcing copyright violations on the whole, and because business is so competitive in China, if one business doesn't violate copyright, someone else will. And because it's such a widespread practice, it normalizes it.

[droxy]

Someone once said to me if you are in business and not getting sued, then you are not in business. I think that is a really sad statement

[foxestacado]

Yeah, it's kind of an impossible situation. The fact is, a lot of the business people I've met are good people. They just have questionable morals when it comes to copyright violations. They argue that sometimes their reverse engineering of a product is actually better than it originally was, that they've made improvements. They point to the fashion industry and say that it's been done all the time, even among Americans and Europeans, and yet why is everyone pointing their fingers at China

[droxy]

If they take a base product, like a bike tire, and improve it, that's a design change, and they can copywrite that design change. But it's bad form if they brand it to capitalize on another company's marketing

[foxestacado]

I agree with all of the above.

It's interesting because a lot of the Chinese people I spoke to are very proud of their country's ability to reverse engineer anything. They are actually proud of that. It's kind of an attitude of, "it took Americans 10 years to create that. It took us 6 months to mass produce indistinguishable versions of it." They come from a totally different mindset. I guess if you had to feel proud of something your countrymen are doing in huge numbers, then that would be it.

[dcltdw]

There was a This American Life episode where they were talking about bribery as a business practice. It got to a point where it was just becoming a business expense, and then some countries (Eurozone first, I think) started saying No -- and that caused a sea change.

So it's possible to fight the "just one asshole" problem, although it's true that there's a big difference between bribery and copyright.

[droxy]

I dont work overseas anymore, but everyone at my employer has to sign a business ethics document that has a no bribery policy.