I like this example better too, or at least I think it's interesting. I think one key is that Shenzhen's manufacturing culture was not too centralised or forma

I like this example better too, or at least I think it's interesting. I think one key is that Shenzhen's manufacturing culture was not too centralised or formalised. This let a culture to emerge. I think your emphasis on is right. Culture, not ruleset or ideology. Emergent, not designed by some philosopher. Most people want an absolute answer, an absolute truth about intellectual property. A clear right and wrong that tells us what IP laws should be. The answer needs be true for chemistry in the 18th century, aeronautical engineering in the 19th, medicines in the 20th and software in the 21st. I don't think this truth exists. Ideology is not the way out of this. Ideological thinking (eg Stallman, Rand, Marx, Plato) is important as an exercise, but when people actually buy into ideology we're doomed to fail. The way an ideological thought process goes is usually: (1) Start from fundamental truths, usually moral truths. Property is exploitation. Unfree software is immoral. Selfishness is the only true love. Platonic forms are the truest truths. etc. Prove your truths metaphysically. Hold them self evident. Make them immutable. (2) Find some complicated but (seemingly) airtight way that everything good about life, the universe and everything will inevitably follow when people accept the Fundamental Truth. Software will be better. The economy will be better. We will achieve a classless harmonious society. Technology will advance. etc. To do this properly, you'll probably need to produce a very long, very boring book that works out all the details. This is how roads and police will work without government. This is how the economy will work without money. This is how software will be an industry when everything is strictly GNU. This is how hover boards will be invented. This step is inside baseball. Anyone who can slog through "Objectivist Epistemology" or "Das Capital" is... you need to be a hardcore believer. (3) Keep adding to no. 2. The more pages, the better. No. 1 can never change. No. 2 now needs to explain the entire world. Don't give up. Keep going. There is no such thing as a corner you can't argue your way out of with enough new terms. Degenerate Socialist State. Core-periphery modes of production. Keep going. Stay motivated. There is no such thing as a corner you can't argue out of with enough focus on a relevant totality, the transitory nature of social forms and a dialectical sense of motion through conflict and contradiction. ...This road goes nowhere. There is no absolute truth of life the universe and everything. You asked the wrong question. I totally agree that the IP/copyright systems that exist today and are being promoted as the no. 1 priority in international law... they are not good systems. At least, it would be very helpful to have other systems as well. The best systems will probably emerge, not be designed by lawyers.