China and intellectual property

I live in China right now, and the concept of intellectual property is relatively new here. It’s a more natural part of Chinese culture to take ideas from each other. Instead of innovating into uncharted territory, Chinese innovate in place, creating immense depth within a single discipline, for instance martial arts, tea drinking, and calligraphy. This is because there are no intellectual property laws retarding development of these disciplines, and people have been copying and improving upon each others’ techniques for thousands of years, spreading across a huge nation.

Emphasis mine.

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=563921&cid=23541879

May 26 2008 12:10 pm | The Global Picture | No Comments »

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