Chinese Pirates Copy iPhone, Make Improvements

An anonymous reader writes "Popular Science notes that manufacturers in China duplicate many well-know products. This includes the Apple iPhone, imitations of which are rolling off the assembly line already. That might actually be a good thing for some users, who might enjoy the user experience of China's own miniOne. 'It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn't. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers.' The cloned iPhone uses a Linux-based system. 'The cloners hire a team of between 20 and 40 engineers to begin decoding the circuit boards. At the same time, coders start to develop an operating system for the phone with a similar feature set. (The typical cloner either uses off-the-shelf code, writes something entirely new, or modifies a publicly available Linux-based system.)' Using the iPhone as an example, the PopSci site walks through the process of making imitation technology."

Chinese Fakes

[apodyopsis]

I spent alot of time in China working in the CE industry and this does not suprise me at all. The local culture is that to copy and improve is natural and not illegal.

However that had not stopped Chinese firms using our own IP systems against us by patenting just about everything they can get their hands on and then seeking money via the courts.

In a very real sense, they are having their cake and eating it as well.

My favorite story was the fake NEC firm and thats also mentioned in TFA :"In 2006, NEC, one of the 25 biggest consumer-electronics firms in the world, went public with the results of a two-year investigation. The company had been receiving complants about products it didn't even make: DVD players, cellphones, MP3 players. Investigators from International Risk, a private security firm employed by NEC, ultimately uncovered a shadow version of the company operating out of corporate offices in China, with ties to more than 50 manufacturing facilities. "On the surface, it looked like a series of intellectual-property infringements, but in reality a highly organized group has attempted to hijack the entire brand," says Steve Vickers, the former Hong Kong police inspector who was in charge of the investigation for International Risk. Executives had their own NEC business cards and e-mail add-resses. They had marketing plans and distribution networks in place. Some "company" facilities even had electronic signs bearing huge, lighted NEC logos. Most bold of all, the bogus NEC actually charged the manufacturers it worked with royalties on its designs. The investigation led to raids last year on 18 of the manufacturing sites and the seizure of nearly 50,000 fake products. Yet the factories themselves are still operating, just not using the NEC name. The ringleaders of the scam have yet to be caught; like the Samsung copiers, they are thought to still be making fakes."

I suspect the biggest problem was trying to persuade them that they had been breaking the law in the first place.

For more information on Chinese patents see..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6939 767.stm [bbc.co.uk]

For more information on the fake NEC firm, see
http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/slick-pirates-s eize-entire-brand/2006/05/29/1148754904830.html [smh.com.au]

To see some fake chinese brands..
http://www.hemmy.net/2007/04/29/chinese-fake-brand s/ [hemmy.net]

Meizo

[Any Web Loco]

TFA is mostly about China's counterfeit industry rather than an iPhone clone in particular. The iPhone clone of interest though is the Meizo M8 miniOne. Loads of pics online if you google it.

Re:Patent, schmatent -- supply and demand wins

[antifoidulus]

I am inspired repeatedly by what I see in China. We are going this Christmas again, to be wowed by the explosion caused by freedom and true capitalism (uncluttered by regulations and taxes

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Funniest thing I have read on slashdot EVER! You do realize that in order to be listed on any Chinese stock exchange you have to be part owned by the Chinese government, don't you? You also realize that individuals cannot "own" land in China, you "rent" it from the government for 70 years. Foreign companies also cannot set up operations in China without having to partner with government affiliated companies. The government can and does shut down companies for no apparent reason. Not to mention the "uncluttered by regulations" part tends to result in highly unsafe products. The list goes on. Somehow, I don't equate "being able to make random knockoffs but cannot do anything without governments approval" to be "true capitalism"
Yeah, uncluttered regulations indeed.

Apple logo too, sorry

[retrosteve]

I've had a Chinese iPod Nano clone in my hands. It works fine. It's ugly, with a cheap-looking finish and a fake clickwheel that's really just 5 buttons. The power and data interfaces were USB, not Apple's iPod type. BUT

It had a bigger screen, supported video, had a built-in FM radio, handled most audio and video formats, and...

it had apple logos and names all over it! More and bigger than the real iPod. Who's going to stop them?

By the way it sold for 40 dollars equivalent in China.

Re:iClone likely has cut & paste, unlike iPhon

[wrf3]

Weezul wrote; Isn't the iPhone inherently "badly integrated" with itself because it lacks cut & paste?

John Gruber, of daringfireball.net, makes the argument [daringfireball.net] that "it's good that the 1.0 iPhone shipped without them", even though he wishes this functionality were present.

OpenMoko

[xrayspx]

I'm waiting for OpenMoko [openmoko.org] to launch. That seems like a device with a little more thought put into it than this clone. The guys in the article just seem to be interested solely in responding to Apple with a quick knockoff to make a few bucks.

Re:Cool!

[king-manic]

Socialism killed millions of people and impoverished billions. Regulation is a violent intervention in peaceful trade, it's legitimate to oppose it, with force if necessary.

Communism != socialism. Sweden, denmark, Canada etc.. are socialists. USSR, China and Cuba are Communist. Stop it with the confused drivel.

Re:Cool!

[Arthur B.]

Communism is a phase that is supposed to follow socialism. In communism the means of production are allegedly shared by everyone but this is preceded by socialism which consist in the dictatorship of the proletariat and state ownership of means of production.

Sweden, Denmark are social-democracies, not socialist countries even though they do rely on socialism as an ideology.

Re:US can't legally buy pirated products

[Frankie70]

US cell phone companies will have to recognize and allow the miniOne into their cellular networks.


What a dumb commnet. You could just get a SIM card from T-Mobile or any other GSM provider & plug into
the phone. There is no absolutely no way, the provider will able be able to detect it or do anything about
it.

Re:Cool!

[Skreems]

Fascism != Communism. USSR and China are fascist dictatorships. Cuba kind of is, but a more benevolent one perhaps. Anyway, don't confuse the evils of fascism with communism.

Re:Cool!

[Ironsides]

decent and honest

Sorry, but McDonald's never said they were a health food store and the cosmetics say look and feel younger, not make it younger.

Lord of the Rings? Some screwy thing in copyright law involving a difference between paperback and hardback books. Did you ever notice how any decent publisher still payed royalties to Tolkien even thought they didn't have to?

In China there is a long tradition for copying great masters, certainly in arts, but also in other matters. After all, if something is good, why not?

So, do they see copying homework and research and taking credit for it as their own as good as well?

Re:Patent, schmatent -- supply and demand wins

[STDK]

Local musicians aren't able to sell their CDs. Anything popular from local bands will be sold on the street for maybe fifty cents. There is basically no music scene in China, everything is bootlegged from Hong Kong or Taiwan or the US.

I've scanned the car radio for 6 months now without finding western music once. The senario you present is only true for Beijing, Shanghai and to some extent Guandong. The last 1.1 billion lives fine without western-knockoff music. STDK

Re:Patent, schmatent -- supply and demand wins

[Lumpy]

Goods in China are marginally cheaper, but it's at the expense of shoddy products that are often of a lower quality, and of a moribund IP development, and a lack of locally produced culture. There is no motivation to doing work or putting expense into research, if there's no economic reward - and there's no economic reward when your ideas are ripped off immediately.

nice FUD there. Dod you make it up yourself or are you echoling what you have been led to believe?

The Black market knockoffs, the ones branded IDENTICAL to the real thing are usually shoddy or worse.

The grey market knockoffs that use their own branding but advertise "like the iphone" and look like it and act like it are typically of very good quality.

I have LOTS of grey market items, Ebay is full of them, and I usually look for those before the overpriced brand name stuff.

I Love my ilo 37" LCD HDTV, it cost me 1/3rd of what a panasonic does and who cares if it only works for 3-4 years, the panasonic will only go for 7-10 so i'm out ahead anyways.

Re:Patent, schmatent -- supply and demand wins

[BobGregg]

Let's just say you shouldn't bet your life on that. Nobody I know of in Beijing (my wife is from there, I've been twice) drinks tap water, filtered or not, without boiling it first. As for the filtering, there's filtering, and then there's filtering. For one thing, tap water would have to be filtered at least lightly to pass it off as bottled, since the water coming from the tap has heavy white sediment in it. Seriously, pour a glass from the tap, and just wait - you'll literally see the sediment settling to the bottom. So you would have to filter that out. But filtered for *safety*? Nah, that would take effort, and cut into the fakers' profits. My inlaws have passed on stories from CCTV about bootleg bottled water; it's relatively well known that you have to be careful about it.

Re:Not the same thing

[modecx]

Hah! Japanese companies were commercially copying American cars soon after WWII, if not during. Look at the Land Cruiser. In it's earliest stages it was a reverse engineered copy of the Willys jeep, which was itself a hastily designed vehicle for the upcoming start of WWII. Seeing the successes of the Jeep in the war, the Japanese government commissioned Toyota with the job, but Nissan later produced the military versions. Toyota even later produced copies of the Jeep for the US government for use in the Korean War; an act which more or less legitimatized the operation, but it would have made no difference anyway. Toyota went on to improve and refine the vehicle, basically copied Range Rover's name in the processes, and there you have it. Arguably, pretty much all internationally successful Japanese light trucks have common ancestry from the Jeep, and it would be silly to argue that many of the internationally successful cars from Japan, of the 60's, 70's and 80's, didn't share in those developments.

Re:Not the same thing

[SerpentMage]

Wow, its amazing how people forget history. Japan WAS ripping off. I know I and my family was working in the car industry during that time. They might not have ripped off the North Americans, but they most certainly did rip off the Europeans. Look at the Japanese models around that time and then look at the Europeans. Similar models. If I may be blunt the Japanese copied the looks of BMW, Porsche, and Mercedes (lesser Mercedes).

Another example is machines like lathes, milling machines, robots, etc. Germany and Switzerland used to have a good business there. Then along came the Japanese and ripped them off. Most of the German machines are history now because they could not compete against the Japanese who undercut on price alone.

What gets me is this revisionism in North America and how North America blindly has forgotten how Japanese used to run around on world fairs with camera's in hand.... Do I sound angry, yeah, I am because I was affected.

Though now I look at China and just laugh...

(What goes around, comes around...)

Re:Cool!

[an.echte.trilingue]

Communism is a phase that is supposed to follow socialism.

That is what (most) communists think. I doubt very much that socialists think that their preferred system is just a stepping stone to another system. Similarly, according to Marx, capitalism was a phase that that was "supposed" to precede communism. That does not mean that capitalists think that they are in a transitory phase for communism.

Just because you like to lump everybody into a "left-right" continuum and everybody left of a democrat is a Das Kapital-thumping commie to you does not mean that that is the way everybody in that group of people thinks.

not socialist countries even though they do rely on socialism as an ideology.

So what, pray tell, makes you a socialist if not relying on and following socialism?

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize we at /, don't get out, but to the multiple people using the present tense...

the USSR hasn't existed since 1991. It is not communist or anything else.

Re:Cool!

[Arthur B.]

What kind of books did you bring? Didn't they check the content at customs? I've had many friends going to Cuba and they definitely check the books.

Re:Cool!

[Dragonslicer]

Fascism (as an extreme of capitalism) and Communism (as an extreme of socialism) are independent of authoritarianism and libertarianism. You can have both fascist dictatorships, such as Nazi Germany, and communist dictatorships, such as the USSR and China. In theory, you could have a libertarian, capitalist government (everyone, including corporations, are pretty much allowed to do whatever they want while the government sits around doing nothing) or a libertarian, socialist government (you pay taxes, and the government gives out money to help people but otherwise stays out of people's personal lives). The Political Compass [politicalcompass.org] is a good site to check out.

Re:Two-way street

[Azuredream]

Actually, Melville didn't lose "gobs of money" to copying in England. All of his works were originally published in England before being published in America.

Re:Cool!

[grassy_knoll]

For instance, the acts of Stalin to execute his own people is caused by a fascist system. The starvation of people due to lack of resources is the result of a communist system. Any outrage of atrocities should be directed solely at the former political ideology and really has nothing to do with the later one, which is really just a poor economic system with no real malicious properties.

o.O

Stalin... was a fascist? If your historical revisionism can call the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee a fascist your skills at metal yoga are truly impressive.

As to communism being only an economic system, that's a non-standard definition.
From the all knowing Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production. It is usually considered a branch of the broader socialist movement that draws on the various political and intellectual movements that trace their origins back to the work of Karl Marx.

So the common view seems to be as political as it is economic.

It doesn't matter if the citizens of a state are killed in killing fields [wikipedia.org] or as a result of Communist economic policy [wikipedia.org], the end result is neither system is designed for the benefit of it's citizens but instead operates to their detriment.