Abstract
The examination of imperial China’s protection of intellectual creations, the evolving recognition of individual intellectual endeavors, and the aggressive administrative enforcement infrastructure in the last chapter reveal clearly the public-oriented cultural trait of China’s intellectual property regime. As a matter of fact, it has long been recognized that different legal systems are deeply embedded in the cultures from which the legal systems evolve. Montesquieu argues that the laws of each nation “should be adapted in such a manner to the people for whom they are framed that it should be a great chance if those of one nation suit another” [1, p. 6]. For Montesquieu, different social as well as geo-environmental conditions prescribe the bounds of different systems and cultures. For example, Montesquieu indicates that those people who don’t cultivate the land enjoy great liberty as they are not fixed [1, p. 277]. Not only political systems but also religions are products of the natural selection process in response to distinctive social geo-environmental conditions. Montesquieu suggests that this is the reason why Islamism was established in the Mid-East but not in Europe and Christianity is maintained in Europe but is almost impossible to be established in China [1, pp. 252, 302].
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For the influence of the view of tradition and past, see Alford [4, pp. 19, 20]. He argues that at the heart of traditional Chinese society’s view of intellectual property is “the dominant Confucian vision of the nature of civilization and of the constitutive role played therein by a shared and still vital past.” In this vision, the past serves “dual functions” through which on the one hand individual moral development was attained and on the other hand power legitimacy was born and guidance of social structure was constituted, which justifies “broad access to the common heritage” as well as “demanding more controlled access.” See also Alford [20]. For the ontological views of the relationship between new creation and old knowledge, see Drahos’ discussion of an inventor as a creator as well as borrower, Drahos [21, p. 61].
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Note that the survey collected 205 questionnaires altogether in China, but the table here indicates the sum of males and females is 204 in China. This is because there was one participant in China that did not identify his or her gender in the questionnaire.
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Because this is a previously published and validated scale, we did not change the scale despite the low reliability among our Chinese sample. However, it should be noted that similar country-level differences appear with a subset of items that have better scale reliability among our participants. Repeated deletion of the items with lowest interitem correlations to create a scale with the highest reliability among both Chinese and Canadian data resulted in a 4-item scale, containing items 2, 3, 6, and 7 of the scale. Alpha levels for this scale were α = .72 among Chinese and α = .67 among Canadians. An ANOVA controlling for gender and legal background found that Chinese were also marginally higher on this collectivism subscale than Canadians, F(1,293) = 3.33, p = .07.
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See supra discussion 3.3.
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Guan, W. (2014). IP Perceptions Survey: The Dynamics in Reality. In: Intellectual Property Theory and Practice. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55265-6_4
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