exb00st

Chinese automakers cloning cars and giving them mockingly funny names has been ruffling a lot of feathers the past few years. Imitation is a given in the auto industry, and while there is a difference between taking a great styling cue and transforming it into your own, blatant knockoffs IMO are unethical, although they seem to be widely accepted in China - from phones, to leather goods, furniture and cars.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortun....fortune/2.html

http://www.cartype.com/page.cfm?id=1497

And their latest monstrosity... http://www.autoblog.com/2009/05/12/chinas-...ental-knockoff/

It's probably unlikely that they'll face any consequences for design theft... I wonder how they can live with themselves knowing they completely ripped off the hard work of other people.

mingster

they won't face any consequence for copying, and those mofos live with themselves just fine. recall the original Lexus LS looked like a certain german car?

finally, since when did pirates feel the need to be ethical?

one day they'll design something original, in the mean time, enjoy the copy with a 4-cylinder, 100HP engine that goes from 0-60 in 2 minutes

Stealth_SUX_

And the reason there not sold here...

ANSWER: After a 20mph crash the car is totalled and you are dead...

Yellow_S

Mingster, aren't you of Chinese descent?

Vik2000

that shuanghuan ceo looked nothing like X5...

565565

It's because they have lax patent and copyright law enforcement.

America might not remember, but there was a time when America was JUST like China, back when it too was a developing industrial nation and basically copying everything British it could get its hands on. It's not about good or evil, moral or immoral, it's about common sense and making money. Countries don't make copyright and patent laws out of altruism, they make those laws to protect their own businesses and IP. There is no point to having copyright/patent laws if you own country makes nothing worth copyrighting/patenting. During it's own industrialization, American factories were set up to be basically clones of successful British ones, the goods were naturally clones as well. It got so bad that the British made smugging British industry and technology out of Britain punishable by death. A particularly amusing example was how American bootleggers illegally printed pirated version of Charles Dickens books. They would buy the latest Dickens book in Britain, and then literally run to the docks. Their ships were actually mobile printing factories, and they would print illegal copies while on the journey. By the time the ship docks in America, they would have thousands of pirated copies to sell. Obviously Dickens didn't see a cent. The competition for bootlegging in America had gotten so out of hand that waiting to print bootleg copies in American meant you would have missed the boat, pun intended.

Of course America wasn't the only industrializing nation ripping off Britain. Did anyone wonder when this whole "Made in ....." label start? Well the original "Made in ...." label was actually "Made in Germany." This was because industrializing German had become so notorious for making cheap knockoff British goods that the British couldn't take it anymore. They passed the Merchandise Marks Act 1887 to mandated that all German goods to carry the shameful "Made in Germany" label to identify it as a knockoff.

As both America and Germany finished developing, they finally made/invented stuff worth copying by other people. Slowly their lax copyright and patent laws became an burden rather than an advantage. That's when they finally started to heavily enforcing their own copy right and patent laws, bringing their age of piracy and bootlegging to an end.

Recently Chinese businesses have shown great interest in acquiring technology and IP for themselves, such as Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC branch, the Chinese purchase of MG, the Chinese purchase of Delphi's suspension branch. To protect the IP that they now own, they will eventually have to pass stronger copyright and patent laws to protect what is now their own IP. I personally will kind of miss these Chinese knockoffs, because honestly they've been more amusing and laughable than threatening to the products they intend to copy. Well there is always India/Vietnam/Cambodia to take over for them.

Yellow_S

^ Thank you for the history lesson, professor Bob!

LEE72

They're pretty laughable! I wouldn't put them in the same category of pirated goods such as software though. If you buy a Bentrey, you're buying a Bentrey, and as such you're not fooling anyone.

mingster

yes i am, but that won't prevent me from calling them mofos, especially when they make the rest of asians, let alone chinese, look bad. how many non-asians can tell asians apart? i've met NONE, even though it's easily apparent to me what their ancestry is upon a glance (most of the time).

i do think they'll catch up, eventually, but creative designs and technological advancements really has a pre-requisite the chinese sorely lack today: freedom of thought. they might be enterprising, they might be hard working, but if there isn't a culture of generosity, culture of giving, culture of freedom of thought, culture of tolerance (look at how the Han Chinese treats minorities like the white people in china, the tartars, the tibetans, the urghurs), no amount of copying will become originals.

not that we americans are so much better - GPMike for example has no qualms about using "go back to your country and people" with board members like me. yet just because his ancestors arrived here a few generations earlier and killed off the indigenous people before my kind had its chance, he gets to brag about being a real american?

jokes aside, i would say america is strong because of its (more recent) history of tolerance, culture of giving (we give more per capita as a % of GDP to charitable causes than any other country), culture of generosity, and most importantly allowing the freedom of thought (and the heated exchange of it on the politics board ).

china may be becoming capitalistic, but the general society still pushes for conformity, singular style of education, singular train of thought, and singular culture absorption. communism is the most jealous of all religions, add that to the Han Chinese's "5000 years" of cultural "middle kingdom superiority complex", and you have a formula for a much smaller pool of inventors who can think outside the box. but they've got the advantage of sheer numbers, 100 geniuses out of a million people will certainly give china an advantage (they've got over a billion and we've got what, 300 mil?)

K1ngfunK

Digital piracy is unique because it is a 100% exact copy made out of "thin air" if you will.

If my friend said he'd "burn me a copy" of his new car, I'd be all over that!