Jake's View | To see the fallacy of Trump’s intellectual rights charge, shall we all pay China for the use of paper?
Intellectual property protection does more to inhibit creativity than to promote it. We reward people to stop other people from making use of ideas that are really attributable to all of society.
“The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair economic practices including massive intellectual property theft ...”
US President Donald Trump
-- SCMP, January 28
His list was longer, of course, of all the practices to which the US turns a blind eye or deems fair when practised by the US.
But I shall restrict myself here to his complaint about intellectual property theft and to China, as China is obviously the culprit he had in mind.
First, some perspective. The figures show that intellectual property royalties paid by China to foreign entities currently run at about US$27.4 billion a year, a tenfold increase over the last 15 years.
The present figure comes to just under one quarter of one per cent of gross domestic product. Strange to say, it is about the same proportion of GDP that the US pays foreigners in intellectual property royalties.
Ah yes, but the doctrine of American exclusivity clearly states that the US is the “bestest country” in the whole wide world, which must mean that Americans invented everything (move aside, you Scots).
