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Hot Property: The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization | 
| Author: Pat Choate
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $21.02
You Save: $5.93 (22%)
Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 520061
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0375402128
Dewey Decimal Number: 346.73048
EAN: 9780375402128
Publication Date: April 26, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 7 to 12 days
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Product Description
The problem of pirating and counterfeiting has grown from small-scale imitations of Levi’s jeans and Zippo lighters to a phenomenon that costs the United States an estimated $200 billion dollars per year. Pirated DVDs, computer software, designer clothes, and machinery flood global markets, inflicting heavy losses on U.S. businesses, while counterfeit medicines, auto and aircraft parts, and baby formula regularly cause fatalities around the world. The theft of artistic and scientific creation is draining our economy. It is the great economic crime of the twenty-first century.
Pat Choate, the author of the best-selling Agents of Influence, examines the roots of conflicts over intellectual property and how the establishment of patent and copyright protections helped propel the American economy. He interweaves the stories of Eli Whitney, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison to illustrate how the United States transformed itself from a largely agricultural society into a manufacturing, scientific, and technological superpower, giving rise to further copyright and patent protection laws. He traces the emergence of Germany, Japan, and China as rivals to American primacy through copying, counterfeiting, and underpricing American products and media. He reveals the shockingly meager effectiveness of current efforts to defend American businesses, inventors, and artists from corporate espionage. And he sounds a powerfully convincing warning that the general indifference of our government toward the security of American intellectual property is already affecting job security and the economy in general (an estimated $24 billion is lost each year to pirated films, music recordings, books, and other merchandise in China alone).
Hot Property is an impassioned, clear-eyed, and sound assessment of one of the most serious problems facing the American economy today, certain to be one of the most widely discussed books of the year.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Stone Cold August 2, 2005
7 out of 11 found this review helpful
As an IP lawyer, I have a great type of interest in this field. I read a lot of books on this topic, and review them as well. This is one of the worst I have ever read.
I concede that Choate can spin a good tale, but the facts of the matter are that he knows nothing about this field, and it shows. By page four of the introduction, he is trying to scare people about the significance of fake or counterfeit goods by demonstrating actual cases of companies with substandard aircraft parts. The problem?
None of the cases cited involved faked parts, or intellectual property piracy. Make me scared to fly, sure, but even on Choate's own description, these were just American companies making their own substandard goods and shipping them off. It just gets worse from there.
There is all kinds of pro_America assertions, but little back up. In fact, next to no context even. Choate, for example, rants at the Germans for enforcing their patent rights to an anti malarial drug during WWII, at the expense of American soliders. The fact that we were in the middle of a vicious war with Germany at the time seems rather relevant to context and yet is never mentioned. And the fact that the USA then appropriated all of Germany's patents at the end of the war is seen as totally justified.
Later, Choate refers to patent examiners listening to H. Ross Perot speak at a conference as a "dedicated and patriotic act." No mention is made of how Choate was at that time Perot's VP candidate. Or that patent examiners listening to a non_patent trained person, or even legal or scientific trained person was probably a complete waste of their time and the government's money.
As a reviewer, I used every trick to get to the end of this book. I used to lie in bed at night and poke my boyfriend and go "listen to THIS!" Even as a non-IP guy, he could easily see how bad this was, logically and otherwise.
I could go on and on for pages about the problems with this book and in fact I have for a professional book review. All I can say here is that if you spend money for this book, you have paid too much.
 It's Hotter than Hot May 14, 2005
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Choate has taken Intellectual Property, what normally would be a mundane subject, and elevated it to a riveting saga of the our history and evolution of this body of law. In and extremely balanced fashion, he deals with abuses we incurred to the intellectual property of others as well as violations of the rights of US entrepreneurs and inventors. Choate provides example after example of how our laws were developed as well as how numerous prolific individuals like Whitney, Bell, Edison both benefited and suffered in the intellectual property game. He also documents that tactics and strategies employed first by corporations and recently by nations to inappropriately capture, control, and exploit the innovation, creativity and intellectual resources of others.
It is a fascinating work filled with new and startling information that I found my self unable to put down. It is easy and enjoyable to read. It is must reading for every corportate executive responsible for the intellectual property of his/her company and it is must reading for every law maker across the nation!!
Blew me Away May 18, 2005
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
I sort of expected "Hot Property" to be another stuffy business book. However, I could not put the book down when I began to read it. It was great!
Mr. Choate provides great insight into the creation and growth of IP law. Colorful stories about inventors make it an entertaining book and the strategies revealed and used by Japan and China have really opened my eyes.
This is a very timely book and ties in with many of the current news stories on China's attempt to buy, steal and appropriate intellectual property from every corner of the world.
If you are an inventor, company CEO or anyone dealing with IP, "Hot Property" is essential reading.
The Emperor's Clothes August 19, 2005
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Pat Choate is a straight shooter, and one of America's preeminent entrepreneurs of ideas. He is also a hell of storyteller, and a man of practical policy for profitable democracy. His focus has long been on the capacity of the American society to innovate, to build a nation of enduring foundation and continuing vitality. Choate's latest work, , shows his passionate vision and displays his superb gifts for telling the tale, and for laying things out in ways in which we know they were meant to be.
But the empire of Global Totalism that would control the world today is naked in its desire to take all resources, all capital, all which humanity would bequeath its posterity (and perhaps that posterity, too) into its ravenous maw. And that empire sees Choate and his kind as, um, problems. So when those who dare point out the nakedness of the current imperium, and speak with clarity, and passion, and literary (is this non-efficient?) force about the need to be clothed with true innovation for the advancement of mankind, the minions of the imperium slither forth. These minions try to make sounds of reasonableness, but their true intent is heard in the sibilance of their forkéd tongues.
Choate was punished mightily before in telling the simple truth about Japanese manipulation of USA Congressional action in the now classic . And while the voices have been somewhat more muted in discussion of , the new Global Totalists would have any tome by Choate rendered to the ash heap of history. He knows too much.
Eyeing the current giveaway of America's intellectual patrimony, tells some great stories about how a young America stole great European ideas to further its economy, and how the Germans, the Japanese and now the Chinese - each using different character-marking means -- have systematically done the same to further their own national ends.
Frederick Jackson Turner noted the importance of the American Frontier in the shaping of its peoples' character at the closing of the 19th Century. And so the frontier days of American innovation and invention reached new boundaries with the end of the American Century and the Millenial turn. Hot Property gigs the galloping globalists' giveaway of America's manufacturing capacity, it's patrimony of ideas, and the very frontiers of American innovation. Choate is a range rider - looking at the borders of this nation, protecting the frontiers of innovation from the poachers and the rustlers riding the contemporary range of ideas, practical discovery, and innovation.
USA intellectual property borders need protection, and protection is not a closing with an encircling wall. Times have changed. The USA's ability to maintain the integrity of those blessings bestowed upon us by "Nature and Nature's God" and by a living Constitution needs reinforcement. GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA - whatever alphabet mantle the Global Totalists of the Davos Cabal wish to clothe their avarice and greed, we must point out that these are transparent garments. These garments do not cover the Global Totalists rapacity.
If other observers are right, the Market States are on the rise. But a truly free global trade can only be achieved among a world of equal trader platforms, unfettered by imposed handicaps or cheated by favors. The importance of Hot Property is that it offers policy initiatives that might actually make America more competitive in a wordly, wise, eyes-wide-open market place. The globalist nightmare, with its totalist control of ideas and even consumer behavior, could end.
Choate's book alone cannot make the difference. That will take concerted action of a kind which the forces of global capital efficiency will oppose, whether that opposition comes from Nanjing, Osaka, Davos, or a yacht cruising off the coast of Connecticut. If there are choices left to make, Americans together must make them. Choate's work gives us tools to make those choices. is not yet widely read. But the fault for that is not with the book or its author. It is in us.
Buy this book. Read it. Use it.
Same old charges May 10, 2005
4 out of 11 found this review helpful
This book is just a laudry list of old and hackneyed charges Americans used to make against the Japanese. These are really just excuses for failure to innovate and compete. And I agree with Mr. Lee that if American corporations weren't making lots of money in China, they wouldn't have gone there and stayed there in the first place. Mr. Riley's case is exceptional and can be countered with a hundred cases showing that patent infringement is a small price to pay for doing business in China. No American or Chinese government is forcing American corporations to go to China. They go there because the money is there. It's the free market at its best. They could have gone home, if they chose. But they didn't, don't, and won't go home. If the corporations themselves aren't complaining loudly, that's because they see no need to do so. Why should we listen to a little ivory-tower academic like Choate?
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