Trading our intellectual property for a lamb chop ...

In the US, piracy remained the official policy until American writers emerged and enjoyed international sales - but had no foreign copyright and received no royalties from overseas! Then international agreements were quickly signed to protect American intellectual property in foreign countries. (The same applied with patents: once the US had its own amazing inventors to protect, there was a need for international agreements to prevent their work from being pirated.)

In this culture of government-approved piracy, America was also the first country to treat an industrial spy - such as Frances Cabot Lowell - as a national hero. It was when Britain dominated the textile industry, and America was desperate to obtain the know-how of the Cartwright loom, which was the secret to the British success. So in 1810, Mr Lowell set out to deliberately pirate the technology.

Lowell was well educated, and well prepared. He went to England on the pretext of seeking a cure for ill health, taking his wife and family with him. The English manufacturers saw him as a potentially wealthy client and had no idea he was engaged in industrial espionage.

“Eventually, Lowell accumulated from his British hosts all the technical information he needed to build a fully integrated textile mill” says Choate, and returned to the United States where he was hailed as a hero. He went on to establish the Lowell textile mills and became exceedingly rich.

The American patent system protected its own citizens, but its laws did not apply to foreigners - so there was nothing the British could do about the theft of their inventions in America. This was how America “became by national policy and legislative act, the world’s premier legal sanctuary for industrial pirates” (Pat Choate p30).

There is no doubt that the American policies of stolen patents paid off and established the basis for its immense wealth today. The US could “jump-start” all the many forms of industrialisation, with stolen copyright and patents. It also had a culture of mass literacy, and could draw on skilled workers. By the middle of the 19th century, America was able to establish its industrial dominance.

During the 20th century, America stole many of the patents associated with the film industry - thereby establishing its ascendancy. The most famous American inventor, Thomas Edison played a leading role in getting the movie industry off to a good start: he registered nine movie patents, the most significant of which was his camera which at first dominated the industry.

He built the world’s first movie studios and set up the monopoly, the Motion Picture Patent Company in 1907 - but there were other (European) inventors/competitors, who were distributing films in the US. So Edison simply pirated their films and showed them himself. “Thus it was” says Pat Choate, “that Auguste and Louis Lumière, and George Méliès, true (innovative) pioneers, withdrew from the US market, because the films were being pirated by America’s most admired inventor” (p74).

Not that US movie piracy was always directed against foreigners. William Fox, the father of today’s big media company pirated Edison’s inventions - which is one reason he fled to the west coast and helped to establish the Hollywood movie industry: it was out of the reach of the east coast law enforcers.

And of course, as with books, and industrial inventions, once the US had pirated the essentials and established its own commercial interests, the energy went into setting up laws that were designed to protect its own intellectual property from bring pirated by any other country. To have a trade agreement with America, countries now have to sign up to “harmonise” their own IP laws with those of the United States. They are the laws that favour American IP and which Australia agreed would become our laws, when the trade minister Mark Vaille signed the FTA.

Which is why Australian inventions may languish - or be swiftly acquired.

There is no secret now as to how the US got to own most of the world’s IP at the end of the 20th century.