This Wall Street Journal article (Asia’s High-Tech Boom Is Good for Us, Too, by Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung) trots out the party line re: China and intellectual property; strong IP protection makes it safer for inventors and companies to take big risks. Now that China will be harvesting the intellectual fruits of its bumper crop of über-educated individuals, they will see the benefit in protecting intellectual property better, and so they will.

One excerpt:

As an economic strategy, copying makes sense when your main competitive advantage is cheap labor. But the exponential growth of cellular phone networks holds an even more important lesson for Asian economies: If you’re smart, you can skip a few rungs on your way up the value-creation ladder. Many countries around the world never built full land-line phone systems; they jumped straight to cellular.

All over Asia, political and business leaders are thinking about similar shortcuts to a technological economy. There are two basic ingredients: battalions of well-educated and strongly motivated inventors, and a patent system that ensures companies can earn a return on their investments.

…

If everything comes together, the flood of shanzai phones will gradually slow to a trickle, and Chinese companies will themselves start making gadgets worthy of knocking off.

If I had to come up with some word that would summarize the processes of creating “battalions” of capable inventors and instituting an effective patent system, the last word I would use to describe such things is “shortcut.”

And the order of events in that last sentence is incorrect. Chinese companies will not start making pirate-worthy inventions after strong IP enforcement cuts back the amount of pirated goods. Chinese companies will need to start making pirate-worthy inventions before strong IP enforcement will be taken seriously. Copying, up until that point, remains a strong economic strategy.

The article also glosses over the debate surrounding whether there are certain industries that benefit more from intellectual property protection than others (i.e. patents encourage innovation in chemical/pharma, but discourage innovation in software). Maybe China will come up with a more rationally designed system.

The thrust of the article, though, is less about China than it is about America. The writers’ two final points are: America needs to fix up its patent system as well, and what’s good for Asia (larger middle class, a bigger share of the “technology and wealth pie”) is also good for us. The “us” they are referring to meaning American corporations, I assume.