Can our judgment be affected by the country where we live? I think, without any doubts, people will say “yes”. But here is laying another question with great importance. Whose judgment is more correct? One of the issues that are raised between developed and undeveloped countries is adherence to the patents and intellectual property. There are a lot of arguments going from both sides but I will focus only on one of them. Why undeveloped countries do not enforce intellectual property laws? Because piracy support in the long run is more economically profitable for developing a country.
With the fast pace of manufacturing revolution starting at the end of nineteenth century, differences in speed of advancing created need for intellectual property law defense. After about a century of constant development those laws guarantee that authors will get paid for the work that they did. Moreover, one of major requirements for import of intellectual property to undeveloped countries is existence of laws that will protect it from improper use.
Sadly enough there is a huge difference between existence of the law and implementation of the same law. For the countries with young democracy and without highly developed economy piracy, sometimes, is the only answer to the question how to be competitive. For example, Russian Federation, during nineties was the country with low to none respect to the intellectual property. At the same time, same period had the highest rate of engineers invited to developed countries to work. Reasons for that were good education, lower pay rate and familiarity and proficiency with wide variety of programming tools and products. In order to prepare trained specialist, company in developed country were entitled to buy expensive software, provide training and pay more for qualified specialist. People that have been invited to work from Russia were already trained and were asking for much less pay. Definitely this scheme hurts and raises anger from labor force back in developed country but it is more profitable for the given company. At the same time, specialists when they return back to their countries have valuable experience that helps business and economy back in their country. They are becoming middle and upper management familiar with work ethic and guidelines that can help their businesses.
On another hand, there is a huge social difference in income. Let’s consider, for example, cost of license of windows operating system. For developed countries, this is a cost that can be substituted from family budget within two months period without any sacrifices in food, cloth or other basic needs products. In underdeveloped countries, this amount of money for middle class family will be total income of the family for given two months. Moreover, in a lot of cases this might be a total income of the family for the calendar year. In such case, when given an option to buy a license for a full price or to buy a pirated version for a fraction of that, clear winner in this race will be pirated disk.
Nowadays, same examples of achieving success for the cost of others are shown by Republic of China and India. Is there a solution and light in the end of the tunnel? I think there is. Slowly but surely, straggling countries start to develop their own intellectual property and start to stand behind their own authors. But, until this process is wide spread in given countries I don’t think I will see any movements. Due to the fact, that is not beneficial neither to the population, not to the governments.
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