From "Inside the Knockoff-Tennis-Shoe Factory" by Nicholas Schmidle in NY Times magazine.

Beijing’s top intellectual-property officials, meanwhile, seem to disagree over what even constitutes counterfeiting. Last year, a debate occurred between the heads of the State Intellectual Property Office and the National Copyright Administration. The dispute revolved around shanzhai, a term that translates literally into “mountain fortress”; in contemporary usage, it connotes counterfeiting that you should take pride in. There are shanzhai iPhones and shanzhai Porsches.

In February 2009, a reporter asked Tian Lipu, the commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office, whether shanzhai was something to be esteemed. “I am an intellectual-property-rights worker,” Tian curtly replied. “Using other people’s intellectual property without authorization is against the law.” Chinese culture, he added, was not about imitating and plagiarizing others. But one month later, Liu Binjie, from the National Copyright Administration, drew a distinction between shanzhai and counterfeiting. “Shanzhai shows the cultural creativity of the common people,” Liu said. “It fits a market need, and people like it. We have to guide shanzhai culture and regulate it.” Soon after that, the mayor of Shenzhen, an industrial city near Hong Kong, reportedly urged local businessmen to ignore lofty debates about what is and isn’t defined as counterfeiting and to “not worry about the problem of fighting against plagiarism” and “just focus on doing business.”

I am fascinated by cultural attitudes towards knockoffs.

From the dedication to "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, with Julie Sussman, published by MIT Press.

This book is dedicated, in respect and admiration, to the spirit that lives in the computer.

``I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.''

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922-February 7, 1990)

Nice quotation to kickoff a classic on computer programming.

The Pavlovsk agricultural station near St. Petersburg is fighting for its life in Russian courts, defending itself against developers who want to replace it with homes. The Guardian notes the convoluted logic required to strip away the value of something so unique.

In what appears Kafkaesque logic, the property developers argue that because the station contains a "priceless collection", no monetary value can be assigned to it and so it is worthless. In another nod to Kafka, the government's federal fund of residential real estate development has argued that the collection was never registered and thus does not officially exist.

"It is a bitter irony that the single most deliberately destructive act against crop diversity could be about to happen in the country that invented the modern seed bank," said Cary Fowler, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. "Russia taught the world about the importance of crop collections for the future of agriculture. A decision to destroy Pavlovsk would forever tarnish a cause that generations of Russian plant scientists have lived and, quite literally, died, to protect."

The station was established in 1926 by Nikolai Vavilov, the man credited with creating the idea of seed banks as repositories of plant diversity that could be used to breed new varieties in response to threats to food production.

via @ptorrone at braincraft.com