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there\'s any lesson to learn from American college kids, it\'s that people with more time than money would rather copy information than pay for it. 
 
Of course they would! Why, when America was a-borning, she was a pirate nation, cheerfully copying the inventions of European authors and inventors. Why not? The fledgling revolutionary republic could copy without paying, keep the money on her shores, and enrich herself with the products and ideas of imperial Europe. Of course, once the US became a global hitter in the creative industries, out came the international copyright agreements: the US signed agreements to protect British authors in exchange for reciprocal agreements from the Brits to protect American authors. 
 
It\'s hard to see why a developing country would opt to export its GDP to a rich country when it could get the same benefit by mere copying. The US would have to sweeten the pot. 
 
The pot-sweetener is the elimination of international trade-barriers. Historically, the US has used tariffs to limit the import of manufactured goods from abroad, and to encourage the import of raw materials from abroad. Generally speaking, rich countries import poor countries\' raw materials, process them into manufactured goods, and export them again. Globally speaking, if your country imports sugar and exports sugar cane, chances are you\'re poor. If your country imports wood and sells paper, chances are you\'re rich. 
 
In 1995, the US signed onto the World Trade Organization and its associated copyright and patent agreement, the TRIPS Agreement, and the American economy was transformed. 
 
Any fellow signatory to the WTO/TRIPS can export manufactured goods to the USA without any tariffs. If it costs you $5 to manufacture and ship a plastic bucket from your factory in Shenjin Province to the USA, you can sell it for $6 and turn a $1 profit. And if it costs an American manufacturer $10 to make the same bucket, the American manufacturer is out of luck. 
 
The kicker is this: if you want to export your finished goods to America, you have to sign up to protect American copyrights in your own country. Quid pro quo. 
 
The practical upshot, 12 years later, is that most American manufacturing has gone belly up, Wal-Mart is filled with Happy Meal toys and other cheaply manufactured plastic goods, and the whole world has signed onto US copyright laws. 
 
But signing onto those laws doesn\'t mean you\'ll enforce them. Sure, where a country is really over a barrel (cough, Russia, cough), they\'ll take the occasional pro forma step to enforce US copyrights, no matter how ridiculous and totalitarian it makes them appear. But with the monthly Russian per-capita GDP hovering at $200, it\'s just not plausible that Russians are going to start paying $15 for a CD, nor is it likely that they\'ll stop listening to music until their economy picks up. 
 
But the real action is in China, where pressing bootleg media is a national sport. China keeps promising that it will do something about this, but it\'s not like the US has any recourse if China drags its heels. Trade courts may find against China, but China holds all the cards. The US can\'t afford to abandon Chinese manufacturing (and no one will vote for the politician who hextuples the cost of WiFi cards, brassieres, iPods, staplers, yoga mats, and spatulas by cutting off trade with China). The Chinese can just sit tight. 
 
The futurists were just plain wrong. An \"information economy\" can\'t be based on selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in. The information economy is about selling everything except information. 
 
The US traded its manufacturing sector\'s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could
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