Jeroen de Kloet and Yiu Fai ChowCopy right, copy wrong
The global copyright regime can be traced back to a romantic-capitalist ideology rooted in a
belief in individual creativity and ownership (Frith 1993). With the emergence of the cultural
(or creative—see Kong 2014 for the distinction) industries, copyright laws protect not only
the rights of individual artists but also, and more so, entities with capital investments in these
rights, like Disney and EMI. Tellingly, the United States has moved from a copyright violator
to the strongest defender of IPR within merely one century. As Debora Halbert remarks, the
language underpinning IPR adds a strong moral tone to the legal framework. “Making foreign
piracy a moral issue instead of a legal one is an important step in distinguishing the good from
the bad. ... The story creates the identities of victim, villain, and hero in order to justify inter-
vention” (Halbert 1997, 69–70). Such a narrative with victims and villains (Asian pirates abusing
American creativity and technological knowledge) conceals the larger political economy—that
of the culture industry rather than that of the individual creator—and justifies the imposition
of U.S. notions of copyright on developing countries (1997, 72). It is, however, not only the
United States, but also, for example, the culture industries in Hong Kong and Japan that demand
adherence to the IPR regime.
Interestingly, in the mid-1980s, there were virtually no counterfeit goods on the Chinese
market; pirated copies appeared there only after the liberalization of the country’s economy and
the introduction of improved manufacturing facilities (Clark 2000, 22). China became known
as a copy nation due to its integration with the global capitalist economy. The entry of China
into the WTO in 2001 marked a global recognition of China’s increasingly important role in the
world economy—a promotion that came with concomitant responsibilities, hence China’s aspi-
ration to comply more closely with the global IPR regime. On the one hand, this compliance
has been met with critical, anti-neoliberal voices questioning the real value of this acquiescence
to the industries or individual creators. On the other hand, to uncritically validate or celebrate
its inverse, that is, a culture of copying without copyright protection, runs the danger of overtly
romanticizing the labor involved in copying. Furthermore, as Laikwan Pang observes, “one of
the most heart-breaking examples took place in 2004, when knock-off baby formulas caused
the deaths of 12 babies and serious malnutrition in more than 220 others” (2008, 132). The
culture of copying, in particular when it concerns food, cars, and other potentially hazardous
products, can have fatal implications.
There is a certain irony in China’s subscription to the IPR regime. Whereas new approaches
towards copyright are being explored in the West (e.g. Creative Commons), “China appears
to have forsaken ideals of sharing and collaborative creativity for a much more individualized
and commercialized notion of intellectual property rights” (Montgomery and Fitzgerald 2006,
408). Even putting aside the fundamental ethics concerning IPR, what remains problematic in
China is the inconsistent manner in which IPR is implemented. Lucy Montgomery and Brian
Fitzgerald show how creative industries in China try to work around the lack of IPR enforce-
ment by looking for new models of making money, for example through product placement and
innovative uses of Internet technologies. In the music industry, for instance, artists earn so little
from their recordings that CDs have practically become promotional products used to publicize
live concerts and promote celebrity.
Beyond this “official” intention to comply with the IPR regime, some in the West and in
China itself advance what they consider to be the traditional and typical Chinese indifference
toward novelty and a corresponding emphasis on continuity, copying, repetition, and rote learn-
ing to configure a cultural context for the prevalence and general acceptance of the fake. While
one could as easily mobilize other scholarship on Chinese culture to counter such essentialist