Untitled - witz cultural

359THE POLITICS OFHYPERTEXTIn a situation marked by diametrically opposed conceptions of intellectualproperfy, each side believes the other has stolen from it. Whereas countrieslike the United States and fapan, that base their conceptions of intellectualproperty on the author paradigm, accuse Third World nations of piratingtheir ideas, these countries in turn accuse the United States and |apan ofstealing something that belongs to an entire community.This situation appears particularly bizarre when viewed from the vantagepoint of American history, since, as Vincent Mosco points out, the UnitedStates "was the supreme intellectual property pirate of the nineteenth cen-Exy" $7). It neither respected foreign copyright, such as that on Dickens'snovels, nor gave copyright protection to foreigners unless they published firstin the United States. In fact, "it was not until 1891, when the U.S. had a thrivingpublishing industry and literary culture of its own, that it extended copyrightprotection to foreign work." Mosco then asks the difficult question: "If,as most analysts admit, this was a key to successful national economic developmentthen, why is it wrong for Mexico, India, Brazil, or China to follow thismodel nowl What makes copying CDs in China theft, when copying GreatExpectations in nineteenth-century America was deemed simply good businesspractice?" (47).An even more crucial problem with copyright is that notions of intellectualproperty based on the author paradigm, which supposedly reward andhence stimulate originality, "can actually restict debate and slow down innovation-bylimiting the availability of the public domain to future users andspeakers" (155). Those who write about intellectual property often point outthat many corporations elect to rely on trade secrets rather than copyright lawto protect their inventions, and, an)$/ay, as Boyle urges, "innovators canrecover their investment by methods other than intellectual properry-packaging,reputation, being first to market, trading on knowledge of the morelikely economic effects of the innovation, and so on" (140). If electronicinformation technology threatens to reconfigure our conceptions of intellectualproperty, we can take reassurance from several things, among them notonly that our fundamentally problematic ideas of copyright often do notachieve what they are supposed to do but also that other means of rewardinginnovation already exist.As we have observed, one problem challenging print-based conceptionsof intellectual property in an age of the digital word and image involves ourchanging understanding ofauthorship. A second problem concerning intellectualproperty derives from the nature of virtr.ral texhrality, any example ofwhich by definition exists only as an easily copiable and modifiable version-