Google forced by internal conflict to end censored Chinese search engine project

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/17/google-china-censored-search-engine-2/
https://archive.is/dSt4p

GOOGLE HAS BEEN forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company’s privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned.

The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.
 
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Visitor dijo:
It's like owning the copyright to a water wheel or a windmill and having the government stop anyone other than you from building water wheels and windmills and instead only having your company build them while charging fees to the person you built it for. Fuck the whole concept of intellectual property tbh.
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Why the hell would anyone pay the R&D costs to produce things if anyone can just instantly sell it? Just wait around until someone else works out the bugs for you then swoop in.
 
Vrakks dijo:
I don't get the weird thing people have against intellectual property rights. If I make a piece of software which is in high demand, no way am I letting people have it for nothing. Some people like, y'know, working for money and not for a warm fuzzy feeling.
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It isn't a case of you giving something away for free, it's a case of you using the government to crush competition and it only benefits the big players.
What you have to do is continually develop your product so that it gives customers what they want and stays competitive in the market, nobody should be able to come up with an idea and just sit on it to generate income. If everyone else around them understands the idea and the only thing stopping them from doing the same thing is government force how is that a legitimate way of doing business? Ironically this is something I like about China, the tech market over there is extremely good for consumers because there's such fierce competition.

Coccxys dijo:
Why the hell would anyone pay the R&D costs to produce things if anyone can just instantly sell it? Just wait around until someone else works out the bugs for you then swoop in.
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Because being the first to market matters, if you create something new that's in high demand and suddenly you have a bunch of competitors scrambling to copy you, you're already ahead of all of them, you have momentum, you're in position to keep developing your product, you'll continually have the best thing on the market, that's desirable.
 
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Visitor dijo:
The premise is the same
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Not really. A patent is time limited in very meaningful ways, and terminates immediately upon the expiration of the term. It also protects a method, and part of what a rights holder has to do to get that protection is reveal the method to the public, so when the patent does expire, it's immediately available for anyone to exploit.

Copyright is extended every time it's about to expire on Disney's copyrights, and therefore, the public domain effectively doesn't exist any more.

Copyright should exist, but it should be meaningfully limited in how long it lasts.
 
Visitor dijo:
It isn't a case of you giving something away for free, it's a case of you using the government to crush competition and it only benefits the big players.
What you have to do is continually develop your product so that it gives customers what they want and stays competitive in the market, nobody should be able to come up with an idea and just sit on it to generate income. If everyone else around them understands the idea and the only thing stopping them from doing the same thing is government force how is that a legitimate way of doing business? Ironically this is something I like about China, the tech market over there is extremely good for consumers because there's such fierce competition.
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No intellectual property hurts small developers with fewer resources, as a huge company can simply steal their idea and use their billions of dollars of resources to produce a far superior product. It works both ways.
 
Visitor dijo:
it's a case of you using the government to crush competition and it only benefits the big players.
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Don't you want to avoid a small company coming up with a revolutionary idea but going under quickly because a big company starts producing it much cheaper in huge scale?

Of course the current patent system is utterly fucked and barely usable by small companies.
 
Vrakks dijo:
No intellectual property hurts small developers with fewer resources, as a huge company can simply steal their idea and use their billions of dollars of resources to produce a far superior product. It works both ways.
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How does a huge company steal their idea before it makes it to market for them to know about?

AnOminous dijo:
Not really. A patent is time limited in very meaningful ways, and terminates immediately upon the expiration of the term. It also protects a method, and part of what a rights holder has to do to get that protection is reveal the method to the public, so when the patent does expire, it's immediately available for anyone to exploit.

Copyright is extended every time it's about to expire on Disney's copyrights, and therefore, the public domain effectively doesn't exist any more.

Copyright should exist, but it should be meaningfully limited in how long it lasts.
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The premise is the same in my view because they're asserting that you can own an idea. I don't believe ideas are property. If I can make an internal combustion engine as well as you can why should I specifically not be permitted to do so just because you came up with the idea first? It's ludicrous cronyist bullshit. Nobody ever refused to invent the wheel because someone else might steal the idea from him if he did it. Intellectual property is a sham.
 
Visitor dijo:
Because being the first to market matters, if you create something new that's in high demand and suddenly you have a bunch of competitors scrambling to copy you, you're already ahead of all of them, you have momentum, you're in position to keep developing your product, you'll continually have the best thing on the market, that's desirable.
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I think you're underestimating the scale of the R&D costs on some of these things. Even with the exclusivity of the market, these things can take 5+ years to pay their development costs. Some things would take very little time and money to copy then even with the "momentum" you'll not be seeing a return. The more specialised the product the more important these protections are. Yeah, idiots will always buy Apple products even if another company was selling an identical product for half the price but there are plenty of areas where that does not hold.

IP drives innovation by preventing others from just copying the same things over and over. You have to be sufficiently different from the patented product to sell your own so you have to investigate different ways to solve the same problem and possibly discover a better way of doing it. Same with copyright, without copyright people would just copy what is already popular.
 
If small businesses can't push new ideas to market and remain afloat and there's no copyright protection to stop them from aping the designs and inventions of larger companies then that only incentivises the bigger players who can churn out products to keep innovating, it actually creates value in design as a profession because these big players absolutely need to keep coming up with new things, because they can't bludgeon copycats with state force.
 
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