> Have we as global consumers just accepted that the Chinese don’t have to respect the system of copyright or patent in any capacity at all?
Even if these were prosecuted, would it really help in electronics, for example?
Since everybody has access to the same chips and creating a PCB is cheap and relatively quick, what would you even prosecute? Sure, you could prosecute the exact clones, but, most people are just following the manufacturer reference designs from the datasheet so there's nothing stopping someone else from doing that.
The problem is that once you prove there is a market for a piece of electronics, somebody in China will now pick off that market for cheaper. Is this not capitalism at its most raw?
The problem that this causes in electronics is that this trashes scaling as well as customer support. You can sell a $100 thingit, create a reddit community, and mostly tell people they're on their own with the occasional answer from somebody semi-official. Or you can sell a $10K+ thingit and actually provide excellent customer support.
In both cases, you will get cloned and ripped off--which limits the amount of money you can get from the market.
The current "solution" is to always have a cloud component which can't be cloned. This is, of course, anathema to open source, but I haven't seen anybody in open source have a good answer for this, either.
Even if these were prosecuted, would it really help in electronics, for example?
Since everybody has access to the same chips and creating a PCB is cheap and relatively quick, what would you even prosecute? Sure, you could prosecute the exact clones, but, most people are just following the manufacturer reference designs from the datasheet so there's nothing stopping someone else from doing that.
The problem is that once you prove there is a market for a piece of electronics, somebody in China will now pick off that market for cheaper. Is this not capitalism at its most raw?
The problem that this causes in electronics is that this trashes scaling as well as customer support. You can sell a $100 thingit, create a reddit community, and mostly tell people they're on their own with the occasional answer from somebody semi-official. Or you can sell a $10K+ thingit and actually provide excellent customer support.
In both cases, you will get cloned and ripped off--which limits the amount of money you can get from the market.
The current "solution" is to always have a cloud component which can't be cloned. This is, of course, anathema to open source, but I haven't seen anybody in open source have a good answer for this, either.