Intellectual rights in clothing

[esquire.]

I read that some companies are reluctant to use China as a base of operations because they'd have to share their propreitary intellectual rights with Chinese firms. In some industries such as automobiles, China insists that any foreign company must find a local Chinese firm in order to do business and so there would be a transfer of information to these local firms.

However, there doesn't seem to be any such reluctance with the clothing industry. Does this mean that there aren't any intellectual or proprietary rights that that clothing companies are trying to protect from copyright infrigement? I'm not talking about counterfeit goods, but about ideas and designs.

 

[alchimiste]

A sock per se is not very hi-tech. Machinery may be but that's a different issue.

 

[countdemoney]

To give one example, China has terrific plastics productions capacity, really massive scale. But what's in a plastic is far less important than the process that goes in to making the plastic, the recipe is truly more important than the ingredients. If you're a GE or similar, you need to recover that research cost of developing the plastic, the only way to be certain of that is to completely own it. http://www.gestructuredproducts.com/...amer/index.jsp

 

[christian]

The lack of respect for property rights has nothing to do with whether or not you're Asian or not.

In fact, the European nations have shown a similar attitude hundreds of years ago when they copied Chinese ceramics, which in their day was as vigioursly protected by the Chinese as today's intellectual property rights of any multinational corporation.

If you think about it, who's buying all those Asian goods. Europeans and Americans.

And, let's just look at the history of the seven fold tie. People had virtually forgotten how to make it as nobody had manufactured it for over 50+ years. Robert Talbott tried to recreate it, but was mostly unsuccesful. They spent a lot of time and effort in trying to recreate a seven fold tie. It wasn't untill they found an elderly woman who used to make those were they able to recreate the ties which we enjoy today.

So, this should have been classified as an intellectual property. Yet, look at all the other Western tie companies which have their own seven fold ties. I doubt that they spent as many years and money as Talbott did in trying to find how to create one, yet they have their own seven fold ties. Hmm...