Fei-Hsien Wang: Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China
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Fei‑Hsien Wang: Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2019, 368 pp., $39.95, Hardcover, ISBN: 9-780-691-171-821 Bert P. Krages II1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Pirates and Publishers focuses on the development and implementation of the Chinese system of copyright law from the late nineteenth centuries to the middle of the twentieth century. This is a very solid work, written in a primarily academic style, yet maintaining a high degree of readability. The author is to be commended not only for the depth of research but also for the thoughtful presentation of the material covered in the book. It is also a book that warrants a larger audience than might be evident at first glance. To be candid, as a practitioner of copyright law in the United States, I was unsure that the subject would be of much relevance to anyone beyond what I presumed to be a small audience of legal historians interested in Chinese intellectual property law. However, I now realize that the topic is richly nuanced and provides interesting insights into a variety of areas, including how copyright mechanisms affect economic behavior, the role of information in national development, and the intellectual history of modern China. As someone who was educated about copyright law based on the “promote the progress” principle espoused in the U.S. Constitution, I was able to see how different economic, cultural, and historical situations lead to the development of different systems for regulating commerce and information. An important aspect of the book is its discussion about how a major impetus for copyright protection in China came from the desire during the late nineteenth century to obtain knowledge from the Western world and Japan. Naturally, a major source of this knowledge was embodied in books that needed to be translated, rendered into printing blocks, and sold in marketplaces. However, foreign publishers rapidly became reluctant to market their works in China because unauthorized copying blunted the prospect of economic return. This problem in turn led both Chinese booksellers and foreign powers to pressure the Chinese government to impose a system of copyright law. * Bert P. Krages II [email protected] https://www.krages.com 1
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An interesting part of the book describes how, instead of directly adopting Western ideas of intellectual property, the Chinese approached their early copyright law from other starting points and allowed it to develop in other directions. One form of early copyright largely focused on ownership of the tangible means of production, in which the rights belonged to the person who invested the necessary capital, paid the authors for their services, and possessed the printing blocks needed to produce copies of the books. Another approach viewed copyright as a form of intangible property b
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