I got back to Panama on Saturday, July 3rd. I still haven't even coagulated and written down my thoughts about my trip to Dubai and London; but I ran across this and think it's important enough to interrupt everything else.

From LinuxInsider, this article makes a lot of points which I am continually trying to bring to your awareness on this site. Here's an excerpt:

In his compelling book, To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense, which examines the development of intellectual property law in Chinese civilization, William P. Alford argues that according to ancient Chinese history and culture, copying is not traditionally seen as a "bad" thing. To copy someone's work is considered a compliment. Therefore, the very idea of copyright is counterintuitive to the Chinese.



According to Alford, even though the Chinese are credited with some of the world's greatest contributions, from paper to ink, they have never been concerned with protecting the ideas that are created by putting ink to paper.



Patents, trademarks and copyrights are Western concepts. He argues that in imperial China, there was no indigenous effort to develop a significant body of intellectual property law, even after they invented printing, until Western influences introduced the concept to China at the turn of the twentieth century. Why? For the answer, we might have to turn to Confucius.



At the core of traditional Chinese culture is the connection to a shared past, and the importance of the family. Relationships between ruler and subject, father and son, and husband and wife are enduring and paramount. Connecting to the past provides insight into moral responsibility in the present.

Perhaps it is because I have lived in many different cultures, but this seems very intuitive to me. So I am glad to see someone who has credentials present this in a more intellectual fashion. I'd also like to emphasize that the long-term implications of how this is going to change the global scene are staggering. Here's another excerpt:

...it is honorable for artists to use the past to shape how they express their own vision. Copying the work of others bears honor to the quality of that work, and helps transform that work into original ideas in the present. So the replication of ideas that are not your own does not have the negative connotation that it does in Western cultures.



If understanding that interaction with the past is integral to Chinese culture helps explain why the notion of copyright is counterintuitive, consider also the Confucian attitude toward commerce, which says that true scholars let the world discover their work, and real artists create for higher reasons than mere profit.


Because everything comes from nature, humans can only imitate. How can they exclude others from something that belongs to their common past?

Note how this mentality or philosophy perfectly fits with the basis of FOSS. All this is very exciting and makes me want to hitchhike to China; it's one of the main happening place for Linux, yet I still haven't even been there. And after this visit to Dubai, I realize once again that it is necessary (at least for me) to physically experience a place to even begin to understand what's going on there. I had read about Dubai, and had longed to go there for several years; but no amount of reading could get me anywhere near the experience of actually spending time there. This is even more true nowadays since there is so much disinformation in the English language "news" media.

If you're interested in this subject and would like some more ideas to enlarge your thoughtscape, download this paper called The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa, edited by Ezra Pound. Although it's one hundred years old, it's still useful and should at least help you realize how not everyone thinks the same way.


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This just in from Heise.de, Confucius is invoked in this article about patents encouraging innovation in Germany. While this seems ironic, it's also interesting that both sides can be true within the context of the individual cultures. The question is really, which attitude will be more successful in the longer term?