There’s no better blog, in my opinion, than Dean Baker’s Beat the Press, in which he skewers the press for its economics illiteracy, or, at times, for its seeming deliberate ignorance of the facts. Today he criticized the New York Times for characterizing the Chinese as thieves for stealing our intellectual property.
With reference to intellectual property, the New York Times told readers that, “China has a well-earned reputation for theft.” Intellectual property rules are defined by each country. China can only engage in “theft” if it has set up rules that is violating. In many cases, its laws on intellectual property do not provide clear protection to U.S. firms, therefore they may not be engaging in anything that can be described as “theft.”
This brought to mind the fact that, if China is indeed stealing, they may have gotten the idea from us, as they are certainly following the example of the United States when it was a developing nation. History buffs will recall that Charles Dickens used one of his lecture tours here to complain about the fact that his work was being appropriated by American publishers without a dime going to him.
What upset the Americans with their hero, whom they greeted as the most welcomed visitor since Lafayette (Forster, I, 186), was his stand in favor of International Copyright. Without it American publishers were paying no royalties on imported manuscripts. Few people of good will thought the policy equitable, but their objection was to Dickens’ use of his platform as a guest artist to speak out on business and politics. When he did so, some accused him of petty self-serving, in spite of the fact that International Copyright would also serve the interests of American authors, then ignored or short-changed by publishers who could easily pirate foreign materials. In any event, Dickens was equally disturbed by his sponsors’ undemocratic desire to muzzle him, to make him take the stance of an uncritical hero, as if democracy were a fait accompli on this side of the Atlantic. As the copyright issue inflated, it became for Dickens a symptom of a much more pervasive disease, name [sic] the American preoccupation with image-making.
So there’s nothing new under the sun. The likelihood is that the lack of copyright protection for foreign authors was a boon to American publishers, who got their content for free. While American authors may have felt a bit of a sting with regard to their foreign sales or even pirated editions here, those sales were negligible at the time, and, in any event, the publishers probably had more clout with the Congress than the authors. The publisher’s interests probably changed as American sales picked up abroad. There’s probably a similar dynamic going on in China. Once they have secured their place as our lords and masters, and we begin consuming their content, you can rest assured they’ll suddenly see the wisdom of copyright protections. We really can’t complain, since we blazed that path for them.
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