Quote Originally Posted by bourbon View Post
Massive. The cyber-warfare issue may or may not be hyped or exaggerated; the cyber-espionage issue is not being exaggerated.

These people invent nothing these days and steal everything. It is the greatest transfer of wealth in history – the director of the NSA has said as much.

Well, "nothing" is obviously an exaggeration, as is "everything".

Aside from the unnecessary exaggerations:


Let's assume you were correct about the "nothing" and "everything". We have a historical precedent for the total exploitation of a country's intellectual property: Germany 1945. All patents, all high profile blueprints - gone to the victors.
What did it mean? Actually, very little.

The real transfer was in the captured or hired technicians and scientists.
Blueprints with no or only minor captured technicians regularly led to minimal or no success.

The German economy had to be rebuilt, but lack of intellectual property was not among the big problems. Not a single major industry collapsed for this reason. The only key industry that shrank badly was the aviation industry, and that had obvious different reasons in both West and East.


The real challenge is to make good and timely use of documents, not to get them in the first place.


Besides; the U.S. isn't that innovative, either.
The majority of American innovation announcements I know were no innovations, but rather revivals of failed ideas or revivals of European innovations. Now imagine how many of the others were no innovations either and I just didn't know their roots!
There's a lot of show aptitude involved that deceives many people.