The New York Times Magazine today has an absorbing article on China's calculatedly cavalier attitude toward IP, and the ramifications for the U.S. One of many fine paragraphs:

Consider what an advanced economy like ours does best: make movies, produce television shows watched from Helsinki to Cape Town, turn out global pop stars. We design the software and processes that streamline the operations of giant retail chains and global high-tech manufacturers. We engineer advanced engines and the guts of the world's computers. We devise brands, durable corporate identities and fashions. We conjure new ways to move money and put it to work. We turn the most basic tasks into knowledge work. Modern printers, to note one example, rely heavily on the most advanced automated presses, computerized design tools and management and shipping for delivering materials efficiently to consumers and are as dependent on the latest software and technological innovations as a biotech lab. And those 2.8 million American workers who in recent years have lost their factory jobs? They don't learn new ways to use power tools. They are retrained in front of a computer; they learn to run the robots that do the jobs they used to do.

The trouble with this apparently successful state of affairs is that the stuff we do best exists nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Some of our most valuable things -- software codes, pharmaceutical processes, car designs, digital movie files -- weigh nothing and, as e-mail attachments, can move at the speed of light. To learn American ideas and procedures is all but the same as owning them.

posted by James DeLong @ 6:50 PM | International

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