Samsung’s latest bendable screen technology has been stolen and sold to two Chinese companies, according to prosecutors in South Korea.
The Suwon District Prosecutor’s Office charged 11 people on Thursday with stealing tech secrets from Samsung (SSNLF), the office said in a statement.
The prosecutors allege that a Samsung supplier leaked blueprints of Samsung’s “flexible OLED edge panel 3D lamination” to a company that it had set up. That company then sold the tech secrets to the Chinese firms for nearly $14 million, according to the prosecutors.
Samsung invested 130 million dollars and six years of work to develop this technology – only to have it stolen and sold to Chinese competitors. Crazy.
China 2025 = thieve your way to the top.
Edited 2018-12-01 01:47 UTC
Funny how stealing is okay if you do it yourself.
> China 2025 = thieve your way to the top
More like 1825, and every year afterwards.
Edited 2018-12-02 13:44 UTC
…and of course Samsung can file all the hardware patents they want globally, the Chinese court will either recognise with the thiefs as inventors of the technology or, in the oft-chance it recognises Samsung as the inventor, refuse to enforce any action against the Chinese companies. Which means the Chinese companies have the entire Chinese market to themselves, since they can sell at a much lesserr cost compared to Samsung, plus whatever non-Chiha buyers they can export to via online order.
And this is what is generally meant by the phrase “killing us on trade”. And by “us” I mean every industrial country not being China.
Edited 2018-12-01 02:03 UTC
American companies did exactly the same thing for 200 years. They refused to recognise the IP of foreign companies and blatantly stole technology.
https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-nations-ar…
Spoils of war, the independence war was fought up until 1783, just ask Germany, both the US and the URSS took a lot of technology from them and you don’t see them complaining, also Israel took land from the Arab nations after the wars. It’s very difficult to draw a diplomatic line since every nation has been involved in some kind of conquer period. But China right now is a different matter, they are not at war or so have been told.
The US was quite openly stealing technology until 1970 when the WIPO Convention was ratified. It was so bad that many foreign companies didn’t even bother patenting technology because they knew the protection was worthless.
The US government is still actively engaged in massive commercial espionage via electronic interception and hacking. This is not so blatant.
Edited 2018-12-01 04:19 UTC
“It’s okay when we do it. But now that has put us on top, we get to make the rules and pull the ladder up behind us, AND we’ll browbeat you with our superior morality that we pretend to have.”
Says every self-centered entitled tosser.
Exactly!
We’ll steal from the Chinese when they come up with something worth stealing.
The Chinese invented just about everything that led to Western development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions
Edited 2018-12-02 01:31 UTC
People all over the world have invented tons of stuff that lead to the modern world…you think nothing was invented in America? LOL
He never said otherwise dipshit.
And that makes it right?
No, it just makes you hypocritical.
Give me a break.
I’m all out of KitKats.
I don’t know what you are so concerned about nationalism for…Chinese are the most nationalistic people on the planet. And thieving other countries outright as a government policy is not even close to examples cited. It’s a huge stretch to say the US government is as bad as modern day China.
You’re the one that keeps bringing up nationalism into this. You’re the one so concerned about nationalism.
Remember when Thom and a bunch of other tossers ran around claiming some loser who was reselling Windows recovery disks was some kind of hero/victim of Microsoft?
Last I Checked Samsung was a South Korean company, not American. Whataboutism fail.
As a person who is residing in South Korea, I really want to see Samsung being screwed for this. Every Samsung company treats their auxiliary suppliers (i.e. small electronic companies around Seoul and Bundang that contracts to Samsung) very badly.
In truth, the Chinese stealing South Korean technologies is a sign that something is terribly wrong in the South Korean electronics industry.
There is no honor among thieves.
Especially Korean thieves.
Contrary to a number of false comparisons in other comments, to my mind, this is plain stealing.
This Isn’t a scenario where someone happened to stumple upon a patented idea. These individuals set out to Steal the information then Sold it for personal gain.
Take out the Korea/China element (which brings certain bias to the table it seems) this is just wrong.
Tell that to the first commenter who made it an issue of nationalism.
completely agree, if you were to reprint this story as two local companies (wherever is local to you) and you look at it objectively it feels quite clear cut to me.
Sadly, bias has fundamentally shifted the arguments here.
My naive citizen of the world, you might want to leave nationalism alone, but nationalism won’t leave you alone. For example, China’s policy of slapping taxes on imported goods and requiring foreign companies to partner with a local company to manufacture anything in China is a nationalist policy. It’s the reason your laptop is made in Foxconn from overworked workers paid peanuts and why you have no choice on the matter no matter what mainstream laptop brand you choose. Soon there won’t be non-Chinese laptop brands to choose from either, with China gobbling intellectual property and manufacturing everything other countries make at a lower cost. Not respecting foreign intellectual policy is another nationalist policy. So, have fun supporting this fine regime every time you buy a laptop because reciprocal taxes and import penalties for not respecting intellectual property are evil because… uhm… reasons (that’s what we were told anyway).
Edited 2018-12-01 20:06 UTC
But you can’t ignore that the reason that China has become the default location for electronics manufacture is that corporations from rich western nations chose to outsource manufacturing – and pollution – to China.
They didn’t choose it as much as coerced. China is a big market, and since they didn’t have to choose between China and losing that other big market (USA), due to lack of reciprocal taxes, they chose to make things in China.
But even if what you said is true, do we really want companies to have the option to cut corners by choosing to manufacture things in countries with cheap labour and environmental laws? Shouldn’t such countries be punished with taxes that negate any benefits from moving production there?
Edited 2018-12-01 23:01 UTC
Countries like Brazil slap a 40% import tariff on many electronic manufacturered abroud. Consumers absorb that cost, because they are not big enough a market for Apple and Co to move manufacturing and take the hit. Especially whe. You extend it to components as well as just assembly.
[q]They didn’t choose it as much as coerced. China is a big market, and since they didn’t have to choose between China and losing that other big market (USA), due to lack of reciprocal taxes, they chose to make things in China./q]
How is that coercion? You may as well try to argue that Britain was coerced into selling Opium in China.
You are free to not do business in the country, just because it’s a big market. It’s not coercion. It’s greed.
“It’s your fault, you made me do it” is the other war cry of the self-centered entitled tosser.
You seem to misunderstand. The comment chain was about the nationalist spin on the comment, not “don’t talk about nationalism”.
Espionage, theft, etc.. Yeah, that’s been going on since the beginning of time. Is it “right”? No, not in my opinion, but it’s never going to stop so do your best to secure what you can for as long as you can I guess.
This is why the US is going to nuke China at some point. The Chinese culturally don’t even -have- a tradition of the existence of objective right and wrong, which predictably results in evil behavior. If tariffs and sanctions don’t work, physical force is the next step.
Good to know you’re the one with the correct objective morality. The Chinese don’t have objective morality, so it’s okay to kill them because you have objective morality.
Your God, you’re an idiot.
Moreover, China seems to be current masters at ~Realpolitik …it, not US or Europe, might be the key to solving our global issues.
They’re never going to nuke China, it would cause Home Depot and Walmart to go out of business.
Edited 2018-12-02 13:56 UTC
Do you have any clue how much of America is owned by the Chinese? Let me answer for you…. No.
In other words, America nuking China is like China nuking itself. Not going to happen.
Oh the huge manitee!
Won’t someone please think of the corporations?!
Sold to China – not to competitors, not to other companies. This use of language is intentional in order to paint China as a country to look like a crook, a danger. Would this have been the language used if it was sold to US or European companies?
China as a country _is_ a danger but I’d put it at the third place behind two other demonstrably more dangerous ones.
People reading this in 150 years will think it is so cute you are making this all about countries like 150 years ago you would all have been talking about princes and before that about emperors. Corporate is the new nation. Espionage and theft by nations is not a crime by the doer. It’s how you survive. Same in corporate.
I hope this does not come to pass, but it arguably is the linear projection from where we are pointed right now.
Apple and Microsoft copied the Xerox GUI, Compaq copied the IBM Bios, Microsoft copied CP/M OS features (via Q-DOS), Google and Samsung copied the iPhone form factor and app store, Facebook copied HarvardConnection, Musk hijacked PayPal and Tesla from the true founders etc.. In all these cases the victims felt they were stolen from but they lost the argument. The winners write history. There is no high moral ground here, just an undulating plain.
That’s why Europe and USA should put complete embargo on chinese products and every possible import duties and taxes on packages coming from China directly or indirectly until this country of thieves will learn to respect one’s property.
When I started blocking all IP ranges from China and set my server strings to “falun gong” and “kill xi Jinping ping” it resulted in much less hacking attempts xD
An entire country?
What next, are you going to talk about how the Jews control the world?
What’s so great about a folding screen anyway…I’ve seen an iPad screen folded on youtube. It was easy.
Edited 2018-12-03 12:39 UTC
So upcoming “folding screen tech” or “flexible OLED edge panel 3D lamination” like in Galaxy S9, I think?