I had downloaded Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and put a mirror copy on the A42 site here, especially in case anyone wants to download it in Costa Rica or Nicaragua. But Wonko the Sane beat me to the punch on the article. If you're not yet familiar with it, please read it, either the PDF download or the remix on Wonko's eAsylum.net site.

So far, I haven't quite finished reading it yet as I'm still scrambling. But I would like to comment on one extract, from the section on piracy:

From the book:

"All across the world, but especially in Asia and Eastern Europe,
there are businesses that do nothing but take others people's
copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it—all without the permission 
of a copyright owner. The recording industry estimates that it loses 
about $4.6 billion every year to physical piracy (that works out to 
one in three CDs sold worldwide). The MPAA estimates that it loses 
$3 billion annually worldwide to piracy.

This is piracy plain and simple. Nothing in the argument of this 
book, nor in the argument that most people make when talking about 
the subject of this book, should draw into doubt this simple point: 
This piracy is wrong.

...The copy shops in Asia, by contrast, are violating Asian law. 
Asian law does protect foreign copyrights, and the actions of the 
copy shops violate that law. So the wrong of piracy that they engage 
in is not just a moral wrong, but a legal wrong, and not just an 
internationally legal wrong, but a locally legal wrong as well.

True, these local rules have, in effect, been imposed upon these 
countries. No country can be part of the world economy and choose 
not to protect copyright internationally. We may have been born a 
pirate nation, but we will not allow any other nation to have a 
similar childhood."

I don't want to be too critical of Lessig's work, I just want to go off on one tangent, on how I personally see things. So I'd like to make a couple of points about this.

First of all, it's interesting that Lessig states that this is a moral wrong. Note that it wouldn't be a moral wrong if they were selling CDs of Linux or other Free Software. So I'm not sure it really is a de facto moral wrong, like stealing a bicycle. So as much as it is against my personal values to steal software, I'm not going to let him get away with calling it a moral wrong. But, it is certainly a legal wrong.

The second thing I'd like to talk about, which Lessig also states, is that these rules have been imposed from the outside, usually by trade treaties. I don't think he has delved into this part of the issue far enough; there's a lot more to it. In particular, I think it's very difficult to expect an externally imposed rule to have much effect in any given society when members of that society doesn't think something is wrong, no matter how hard it's enforced. If you are familiar with the US government's attempts to change the drug culture in the US via law enforcement, you'll know what I mean.

I don't have any personal experience in the Far Eastern cultures yet, but I have read some about it. I know that it's hard for someone from an individualist culture (like the US or the UK) to understand how someone from a group culture (like China or Latin America) thinks. And since I have lived in Costa Rica for five years, I can talk about what happened while I was there about copyrights.

From this US government document, you can read the US point of view about Costa Rica's copyright compliance:

Costa Rica's copyright law is generally adequate, but not uniformly enforced. 
The copyright regime was revised in 1994 to provide specific protection for 
computer software and in 1999 to protect integrated circuit designs. The 
National Assembly ratified the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO 
Performances and Phonograms Treaty at the end of 1999. Piracy of satellite 
television transmissions by the domestic cable television industry has been 
curtailed, but some apartment buildings and hotels, particularly in areas not 
served by major cable service providers, continue to engage in satellite signal 
piracy. Unauthorized sound recordings, videos and computer software are also 
widespread, although much progress has been made in reducing such practices. 
Video piracy, for instance, has been significantly reduced in recent years. 

When this treaty was passed, there were a lot of newspaper articles about it. There was a lot of talk about how things were going to be different. But for most people, they really aren't. There have been a few big raids on businesses that were highly visible, but for the most part not much has changed. You can still walk into any copy shop with a book and have it copied and bound, usually for about half the cover price. I could tell a lot of "shocking" anecdotes about this, but that's not the point. No one feels guilty about doing this. The sense of property is, "I bought and paid for this book, so it's mine and I can do anything I want with it." The point is, it's going to take a long time for anything to happen when an external government comes in and tries to change a society by having that country's government pass a law. There has to be a feeling of conscience that something is wrong, and that takes a long time to change.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to defend piracy. As a hitchhiker, I am more concerned with making observations than trying to change things. My guess is that societies with lesser developed "morality" about "intellectual property" laws are going to embrace the concepts of Open Source faster than the societies which have more developed senses of same.

A recent article from The Economist has the following interesting observation:

Unlike rich countries, which have a huge installed base of Windows computers 
and billions of documents in Microsoft's fiddly file formats, most users in 
Asia and South America are starting with a clean slate. For a country such 
as China, says Sun's Mr Schwartz, the attraction of open-source software is 
obvious: it is cheaper, so it will reduce the incentive to get pirated software 
(most copies of Windows in China are fake) and thus help China improve its 
relations with the World Trade Organisation. Better still, it allows China 
to avoid being locked into a single vendor—and an American one at that.

What The Economist writer is saying is that rich countries have a lot of baggage to get rid of in "Microsoft's fiddly file formats". What I'm saying is that the problem is really a lot larger than that - the rich countries also have a lot of baggage in their cultures. It's one thing to change file formats; that can be done with a utility. There is no utility that I know of currently which can change attitudes in a person's mind. So I would predict that the US and other rich countries will be unsuccessful in imposing their laws on poorer countries because they are fighting a long-term battle which is on a direct collisions course, both with poorer countries' cultures, and with Open Source culture too. And there's not a lot you can do about that personally except "lead, follow, or get out of the way".