Corporate espionage, secret agents, and conspiracy schemes are all part of Pat Choate’s book “Hot Property, The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization”. In his Hollywood-movie-like account, he talks about what he sees as the main challenges facing intellectual property (to be more specific American intellectual property) at a time when other nations are “secretly conspiring in the dark to snatch those brilliant ideas while smoking on their thick fat cigars in the backroom of some family-owned restaurant”. Ok, he doesn’t literally say that. It’s just the mental image he gives you. Of course, piracy and counterfeiting are serious problems that pretty much every country suffers from. But Choate jumps to conclusions on how “evil” Germany, Japan, and China resorted to tactics aimed at strengthening their economies using American patented innovations. He recounts one example after another of how countries have stolen one brilliant idea after another from naïve American inventors earlier in the 20th century. However, he conveniently neglects to mention that the budding American nation in its early years chose no to respect foreign intellectual property and continuously infringed it until its national economy and industry were strong enough. This seems to be the case with many emerging economies. You can’t just single out Germany, Japan, or China, who are today among the main contributors to innovation patents. In general, Choate fails to make a solid case as he seems to have sacrificed depth and quality for the sake of quantity.Final verdict: Not Hot.
