a new development on the patent front. china just revoked the viagra patent. onmce details come out, i'll be curious to hear the reasoning.

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George P.Landow [ 07/16/2004 07:17]: Here's a paragraph from the last chapter of my Hypertext 3.0 (which is almost done.really): Any American objection to China's actions "appears particularly bizarre when viewed from the vantage point of American history, since, as Vincent Mosco points out [in The Digitmal Sublime], the United States, “was the supreme intellectual property pirate of the nineteenth century” (47). It neither respected foreign copyright, such as that on Dickens’s novels, nor gave copyright protection to foreigners unless they published first in the U. S. In fact, “it was not until 1891, when the U. S. had a thriving publishing industry and literary culture of its own, that it extended copyright protection to foreign work.” Mosco then asks the difficult question: “If, as most analysts admit, this was a key to successful national economic development then, why is it wrong for Mexico, India, Brazil, or China to follow this model now? What makes copying CDs in China theft, when copying Great Expectations in nineteenth-century America was deemed simply good business practice?” (47).