Jeanne-Paul Marat

Well I mean, plagiarism is a thing and thats almost quite literally the theft of ideas. So I think we should at least start by pointing out that the concept is an actual thing that I think most people (including us) Accept.

I think there’s a mixup being made here in equating Chinese practice to the practice of companies…“aquiring” ideas from people giving it for free.

China is, for lack of a better term, “liberating” the idea, design, etc. If a company has the design for a process of some sort that creates or modifies something, and prevents others from having it, a copying of that design to then be produced is liberating the idea.

If someone produces something for free, which someone then “aquires” and sells, they’re restricting the idea. They are taking something previously free and restricting it with those who own currency.

Part of this we should interrogate is what behavior this encourages. Something free then being taken and sold encourages people with ideas to hoard them. Instead of giving away designs for free, people will patent or copyright designs and try to manufacture them themselves, which is less efficient and further restricts the utility.

If something being sold is taken for free then it decreases the value of hoarding and encourages the free sharing of ideas anyway given the lack of value of copyright and such.

Edit: Also, look at a lot of western science and such. Many things supposedly invented by the greeks or by Renaissance mathematicians were actually first invented elsewhere, but the westerners get credit for obvious reasons. The Pythagoras theorem, pascals triangle, etc. There’s also a lot of inventions stolen from native/indigenous societies and passed off as western inventions. So i feel any discussion of idea theft not being a thing needs to acknowledge these occurrences.

(Note: Im personally partial to the idea of doing Maoist naming conventions for theorems and theories and such. I.e, calling the pythagorean theorem the squared sides theorem [or something to that effect], or calling Newton’s laws the principle laws of force [although to my knowledge Newton did unequivocally formulate those first])