Comment by alephnerd
1 year ago
See, you say that, but the ITIF has publicly affirmed IP restrictions were critical to solving COVID and other innovations - https://itif.org/publications/2021/04/29/ten-ways-ip-has-ena...
Don't take the ITIF's (or other think tanks) arguments at face value.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the people who profit from IP law are of course going to tell you that it's the greatest thing since sliced bread and that we couldn't have solved COVID without it. For the sake of discussion I'll concede the point that IP laws are a necessary part of innovation but that brings up a major question -- how much IP law is optimal?
Do we have an optimal amount of IP? Who decides? Why them? What metric do they use? How do we disentangle the conflict of interests between the people telling us we need more IP and the fact that they make gobs of money off of it?
I'm not making an argument one way or the other. I'm making a point that any discussion on the topics provided by the article above is useless as the article itself is just collateral that was created for lobbying purposes. Only argument I'm making is ignore think tanks - they're basically marketing for policy recommendations. Doesn't matter if it's the ITIF, AEI, UPI, ITIF, New America, etc - they're all inherently tainted as they are creating collateral that is meant to be consumed to create talking points or consensus around specific policy points.
Oh I’m certainly not. But I do think it’s plausible China has overtaken the USA on innovation capacity.
I'm honestly not sure about that. I work closely with defense stakeholders both on the Hill and off the Hill, and a lot of the conversations about Chinese power projection sort of seem eerily similar to the kind of conversations I heard in the defense industry surrounding Russia's next-gen fighters, SAM, and heavy tank capacity in the 2013-18 time period. As we can clearly see in Ukraine right now, a lot of that was clearly paper tigers. And no offense to the PLA, but they legitimately have a weaker organization and R&D apparatus compared to even post-1991 Russia. Most next gen PRC designs in the jet space still rely heavily on IP and expertise from Russian vendors like Mikoyan, and they are increasingly left out of IP sharing agreements as competitors like Japan, India, Taiwan, and Australia start inking single use agreements with vendors in France, Israel, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine. That doesn't mean the PRC's defense industry can't innovate, but it makes it harder to productionize or solve very complex problems that require very deep and interconnected supply chains. This is a big reason why the Treasury, DoJ, DHS, State, and DoD have been targeting 2nd and 3rd degree of connections vendors and businessespeople with sanctions when dealing with Russia and China since Obama 2 - it makes it much harder to scale out and productionize weaponry or policy in a manner that directly harms the US.
The problem with Russia's high-tech equipment is that Russia isn't actually manufacturing it. Take stealth fighters, as an example. Russia has only a handful of Su-57s. China has around 200 J-20s, with around 50 more entering service every year.