Friday, January 14, 2022

Mind work theft

Follow-up to this post:

Good new ideas are essential to business and science. America spends a lot of money on R&D to find the best ideas to improve products and processes. Good ideas resulting from mind work are called intellectual property (IP), protected under U.S. law. Those laws also protect the work of artists.

American government (under both the current administration and the previous one) prosecutes IP theft cases and sometimes has enough proof for conviction. In the case of Charles Lieber, they may have suspected that he sold information to the Chinese, but they only prosecuted on the charge of lying to the government because they had conclusive evidence for that.

It is widely believed that "Chinese government-endorsed economic espionage and IP theft is real and will grow, including via sophisticated efforts to infiltrate US science institutions and top universities." Like Harvard.

Lieber himself said that other countries “always want something from you. . . . A lot of countries, money is what they have in excess. . . . That’s one of the things China uses to seduce people.”

from AEI

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