You're getting a lot of flack for this comment, but I think it's a reasonable way of looking at the problem. In the United States, we have strong cultural conceptions about what are acceptable reasons for the government and companies to forcably suppress information (copyright violations, "terrorist" content, white supremacy, child pornography) and what aren't (political dissidence, social stability, insults, most other porn). Culturally, the Chinese have about the same attitude towards political dissidence that we have towards terrorist recruiting content, and for many of the same reasons. Historically, they have seen how political turmoil, if allowed to recruit, can hurt and kill people just how we have seen that terrorism can do the same.
Similarly, the American attitude towards copyright, trademark, and patent laws probably seems ridiculous and borderline unethical to Chinese companies looking to do business here. They seem (from the outside) to have no problem with a phone manufacturer calling itself "Applle" to piggyback on Apple's brand, but that is very illegal under American laws. Similarly, the amount of automatic filtering YouTube and other video hosts have to do under DMCA might block as much content as Chinese political auto-filtering does, although I would love to see more analysis of that.
Being from an American cultural background myself, I have an obvious set of intuitions about which of these are reasonable and which are ridiculous, but I find it hard to make a clear argument about why.
> Being from an American cultural background myself, I have an obvious set of intuitions about which of these are reasonable and which are ridiculous, but I find it hard to make a clear argument about why.
And being technically from European cultural background but having ingested plenty of American-made utopian visions of the world in my formative years, I find myself to have yet different obvious set of intuitions about this. Like e.g. I think copyright-related censorship is overused and borderline unethical, while speech threatening social stability might be a problem.
I say that only to reinforce your point that there's not one and not two, but many differing cultural conceptions about these things.
Copyright and patent enforcement does not suppress information, they suppress specific actions on information. You are required to publish information before it can be patented or copyrighted, the information must be available for the public to view. You cannot compare copyright to censorship, it is practically the opposite of censorship as it's designed to encourage creators to publish information.
Even when copyrights are abused to attempt censorship, US copyright law specifically defines Fair Use as an exemption to protect valuable speech.
Self-governed sovereignty. You and the American entities mentioned believe this. And seek to protect it. Including trademark violators, for example (who threaten Apple's 'kingdom' so to speak).
Similarly, the American attitude towards copyright, trademark, and patent laws probably seems ridiculous and borderline unethical to Chinese companies looking to do business here. They seem (from the outside) to have no problem with a phone manufacturer calling itself "Applle" to piggyback on Apple's brand, but that is very illegal under American laws. Similarly, the amount of automatic filtering YouTube and other video hosts have to do under DMCA might block as much content as Chinese political auto-filtering does, although I would love to see more analysis of that.
Being from an American cultural background myself, I have an obvious set of intuitions about which of these are reasonable and which are ridiculous, but I find it hard to make a clear argument about why.