>Competing on IP alone is very risky. Honestly, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop in the IP industry. But I'm not sure it's going to be the Chinarmageddo

>Competing on IP alone is very risky. Honestly, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop in the IP industry. But I'm not sure it's going to be the Chinarmageddon scenario we always hear about. Plenty of countries are net losers in the IP-based economy... they're paying for foreign-owned patents and copyrights but have little of their own to sell. The balance is probably worse the less developed the country is. Unlike most third world economic problems, though, this can be resolved by the stroke of a pen-- withdrawing from the legal and treaty frameworks that support the copyright and patent systems. Someone's going to try it, probably with a marketable justification of "if we void the patents on foreign drugs/fertilizers/seeds/infrastructure tech, we can make it cheaply for our own consumption" or "we can't afford to be paying for foreign software." When it happens, I expect to see it ripple quickly. It's not something you can militarily or economically retaliate for (the optics would be terrible) and the only losers are the countries that staked their economy on convincing everyone to treat infinitely-duplicable knowledge as scarce.