Intellectual Property and the War on China

Tthe US is openly talking about war with China, and speculating on the possible outcomes. This article, written in 2016, under Obama, and updated this year, under Trump, links to a number of sources in, or advising, the US government on the rosy prospects of provoking China. Here is an example of the proposal of the Rand Corp. (on why a war with China could be limited to "over there" and not escalate to a nuclear war)….."However, even under such desperate conditions, the resort to nuclear weapons would not be China’s only option: It could instead accept defeat."
Well, then, that seems logical.

The current propaganda is that China is unfairly using the superior brains and technological development of the US to advance in their industrial capacity, especially in high tech areas, which is called "theft of intellectual property rights". (This is hilariously skewered in this satirical article, complete with pictures. )They were supposed to provide cheap labor, not to copy the products they were producing for US corporations.

Who made these rules? And when?

Humans have been around for 200,000 years, and the really big advances of our species are lost in the past, but I think that we can say with certainly that they were not subject to patent or copyright laws. Language, conquering fire, learning which plants were safe to eat and which were poisonous, how to make arrowheads and pottery, etc.

What's more, we know that human advances tend to come around the same time in different areas. And not just the most well-known ones, like electricity, cars and telephones either.

Human agriculture started around 10,000 years ago in places as far apart as Mesopotamia, China, Peru, Central America and India. I'm again going to say that no patents were involved.

Patents and copyrights came with capitalism, a couple of hundred years ago, in the capitalist countries. They were originally introduced as an economic benefit, for a limited time, to allow an inventor to be the sole beneficiary of any profits derived from the invention, or book, but then reverted to the commons for all to use.

That is how we get the stories of inventors in different countries coming up with the same ideas at the same time, but one making it to the patent office first, and the other one losing out on the profits. But the idea that only one human on the planet at a certain time can come up with an invention, and that one human can thereafter claim privileged rights to that invention from then on, is clearly wrong. And that idea is an American invention, as far as I can tell.

By WW2, the story of the brilliant individual who invents a better mousetrap, and deserves to profit from its manufacture, was already outdated. Most advances came from teams, and the really big advances came from government-funded research.

In the US, we the people fund the research, and then any brilliant advances are turned over to private corporations, and then we pay the corporations for what we funded. And we call that the Free Market. We are told that this is an infinitely superior system to the Chinese system, in which the government does not hand over free inventions to the private sector, and that we should therefore prepare for war. (Which our government paid Rand Corporation assures us will be good for our corporations, because Chinese trade will be severely impacted. Well, OK, then).

Most people know that microchips came from government research, but so did microwave ovens. Duct tape, GPS, radar, digital cameras, computers, Superglue, and the internet all came from government research, and now we pay corporations for them. Sometimes, we all told that the trillions we spend on the military is not wasted, because look at the great products we have gained from the research. Insulin pumps and epi-pens were also developed by the military and drug companies are profiting handsomely from that research, as well as other government-funded medical and drug research, which is turned over to the medical-industrial complex.

Corporate charters used to be as limited in time as copyrights and patents, with the proceeds reverting to common use when the charter was up (usually in 5-20 years). Corporations won the right to Eternal Life in the 1800s, and they are now working on keeping human knowledge and creativity as an unlimited source of profits. The Disney corporation is still managing to profit from the Mickey Mouse image, decades after its creator passed into the Great Freezer. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was passed, in part, to protect the profits of the Disney corporation.

Richard Dawkins invented the word "meme" in 1976 to explain how human knowledge passes, not through our genes, but throughout our societies, passed from person to person. (Apparently he didn't copyright the word).

We are now being programmed to believe that humans have no right to our common heritage of knowledge. Americans can (usually) see that copyrighting the song "Happy Birthday to You", sang for generations to our friends and families, but suddenly seized by the Warner corporation, is wrong. Most of us can see that patenting the neem tree, grown by Indians for centuries, who were then suddenly in violation of patent law for using it, is wrong. There were even people who tried to copyright the two words "Let's roll", when we were told that a passenger in one of the planes on 9-11 said those words, and others decided to profit from it.


Perhaps the push for not allowing "cultural appropriation" is part of the propaganda pushing the meme that an entire society can tell another society that they "own" entire categories. If tacos, dreadlocks and kimonos can be declared off-limits for anyone but those originating from the societies that are identified with them, so can cellphones, right? So how dare China make or improve on any electronic device, since electronic devices are strongly identified with the USA. Clearly, this is cause for war, right? Let's roll!

Or not.