Intellectual Property and Pirating

Despite an article I recently read in a scholarly economic magazine
about there being more of a crackdown on protecting business'
intellectual property, I see a very high degree of apathy towards the
subject, especially here in China.

As example, I bought a fairly expensive program for my Palm Treo that
has A Chinese Dictionary and character recognizer on it. After showing
the program to a few of my Chinese friends, the obvious question was
(like always), "How much did it cost?" Of course, I told them home
much it was and they promptly were taken aback by its cost and told me:

"Chinese don't have enough money to buy that program." Then, my
more tech-savvy friend responded: "I could find that same thing
online for free!" To which, he went online and sure enough, 5 minutes
later showed me a program with similar features downloaded all for
free! He then said that everything on his phone was also free programs!

Then just a few days later, I was talking with another friend who had a
friend in an African country that had a great idea for export! He could
take an electronic device from a brand-name company, not put the
trademark on it, and sell it in this country for much cheaper. Of
course the big advantage for him was that because it would be imported
as a "no name" brand, it would avoid all of the larger import
duties on name-brand products!

Whether its iPods, Nike Swooshes, or DVDs, SO many things in this
country are pirated. Its even hard to find shops in this country that
sell anything BUT pirated DVDs. That has led me to not buy anything
pirated, therefore any DVDs at all. But even not buying any DVDs
doesn't prevent me from watching the dozens of pirated DVDs my
roommates own.

Sure, I understand the vast majority of people in this country don't
have the money to pay for the kind of software program I just bought
(often the justification I hear). But does that justify every
occurrence of successfully pirated product? Is that just the way this
country works and I shouldn't feel guilty about it because everyone
does it?

Or in the macro sense is the incessant duplication of anything good
actually bad for the economy since it discourages that entrepreneurial
spirit one has to come up with something new? Why don't you just wait
for the "first movers" to make thousands of mistakes in order to
come up with a few dozen things that work. Then, just copy those
products that have proved to be successful and avoid all that trouble
of trying to see if a new product will be successful or not? I don't
know if there is a black and white answer, because even in the US
you've got illegal burning of CDs going on in everyone's CD burner.

Its just another one of those considerations to go into when we
actually look at what we are consuming, its legally, and what effects
it has on the economy. There is one thing that is for sure, most
everyone who is reading this article does have enough means to buy the
real thing and should think a few moments before we just always buy
whats best on our pocket books in the short-term. And I'll join you
in asking those questions a little more honestly of myself too.