On Mon, 26 Nov 2012 13:18:40 -0600, Tim Wescott
wrote:

On Mon, 26 Nov 2012 13:13:42 -0500, Spehro Pefhany wrote:

On Mon, 26 Nov 2012 09:28:28 -0800, Carla Fong
wrote:


Thanks to all the respondents.

We now know that most of these probably are of the same parentage...

FWIW, aside from obvious labeling and painting-to-suit-the-customer it's
common for the basic designs to be the same in China, but produced in
different factories, with different tooling and different quality
control. I don't know how this situation came about, some day I'll
bother to find out.

I think that they don't just shamelessly copy from US designs -- they
shamelessly copy from _anyone_.


To have shame, you have to believe you've done something wrong.

Sharing designs is not inherently wrong.

We don't castigate fastener makers for making screws that are similar
to other other maker's fasteners, in fact we expect them to conform to
ANSI, ASME, JIS, ISO or whatever dimensions etc. unless there is a
good reason to deviate. It's in the nature of capitalism to want to
commodify all inputs to the process and make the outputs unique and/or
single-sourced- so there's always going to be a kind of trade-off
depending on what companies and people can get the government to do to
intervene in what would otherwise be a free-for-all.

(Actually, I think that the whole concept of "copyright", which was
pretty much invented wholesale in northern Europe at the advent of the
printing press, just never made it to the far east).

Knowledge has belonged to the commons for much longer, and generally
excluding it is a temporary thing (patents, for example) upon which it
reverts to its natural state. Copyright is a bit of an anomaly-
lasting many generations..according to the Wiki page Jefferson wanted
to grant only brief protection. But Disney and such like have a lot of
money to lobby with, hence the Mickey Mouse Protection Act:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyrig..._Extension_Act