at http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2007/05/14/070514ta_talk_surowiecki
Excerpts:
"Free trade is supposed to be win-win situation. You sell m your televisions, I sell you m software, and we both prosper. I practice, free-trade agreements ar messier than that. Since al industries crave foreign markets t expand into but fear foreig competitors encroaching on thei home turf, they lobby thei governments to tilt the rules in thei favor. Usually, this involve manipulating tariffs and quotas But, of late, a troubling twist in th game has become more common, a countries use free-trade agreement to rewrite the laws of their tradin partners. And the country that i doing this most aggressively is th United States.
...........
Free-trade agreements that export our own restrictive I.P. laws may make the world safe for Pfizer, Microsoft, and Disney, but they don’t deserve the name free trade."
Both Dani Rodrik and Tyler Cowen seem to have liked this article. An interesting IP case here from one of the comments in MR: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39287061,00.htm
