Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Supremacy
Doron S. Ben-Atar
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005
Of late, a major problem in the bi-lateral relations between Washington and Beijing has been the allegation by the former that the latter is a major pirate of U.S. intellectual property. Software and movies in particular have been pointed to in this regard as Washington has accused China repeatedly of counterfeiting the products of Micro-Soft and Time-Warner. The "software industry alone loses almost $12 billion a year and 80 percent of the software used in the Third World is pirated," says the author.
What this useful book suggests is that the more things change, the more they remain the same for about 150 years ago, it was London that that charging hotly that it was the U.S. that was the major intellectual pirate on the planet and going further to suggest that the rise of the vaunted economic juggernaut in North America was due in no small part to mass thieving from Great Britain.
"Smuggling technology from Europe and claiming the privileges of invention was quite common and most of the political and intellectual elite of the revolutionary and early national generation were directly or indirectly involved in technological piracy…. Americans had welcomed such practices since the early days of European colonization. The American nickname ‘Yankee’ originated in a Dutch word for ‘smuggler’ and suggests that violation of European economic restrictions had been second nature to the colonists from the early days of settlement." Benjamin Franklin was among those who "subversively supported technology piracy." "[Thomas] Jefferson and [John] Adams themselves, whatever their published views, were also not averse to promoting industrial espionage."
They were not alone. "Governments, companies, and individuals actively sponsored industrial espionage in hopes of using the lower costs of raw materials and the higher wages in the New World to propel the young republic into a prominent position in the emerging competitive industrial world market." Indeed, "smuggling British technology to the United States was indispensable to American industrialization." Moreover, "the American press openly celebrated the successful appropriation of forbidden British textile technologies." "Indeed, technology piracy occupied a central role in [the] program to develop American industry. And the nationalist rhetoric used to persuade Americans of its value justified the violation of the British intellectual property laws."
"The most famous of all early nineteenth-century cases of industrial espionage laid the foundations for America’s most interesting industrial experiment – the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. In 1811 Francis Cabot Lowell, a merchant from Boston who was spending a couple of years in Britain for health reasons… had a superb memory and was trained in mathematics. He closely observed his surroundings and each night in his hotel he make sketches of what he had seen. When he came back to the United States he contacted a local mechanical expert, Paul Moody, and together they replicated the machines he had observed in Manchester."
Thus, "within seventy years, from the 1780s to the 1850s, the United States was transformed from an industrial nonentity to the fastest-rising industrial power in the world."
Times change. Now the US, which profited so handsomely from piracy, has been pointing the finger of accusation at China over this very same issue and this issue threatens to poison bi-lateral relations between the two giants.
Thanks to the author we now have the opportunity to gain a broader historical perspective on this controversial question.
--Gerald Horne is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.
