LEARNING
CREATIVITY
About four years ago, I heard a senior folk advising a
youngster who claimed to have passion for shoe making to get an Italian shoe,
dismember it and learn the cutting of the leather, sowing and assembling the
shoe. I also came across a book titled BAD SAMARITANS, THE GUILTY SECRET OF
RICH NATIONS AND THREAT TO GLOBAL PROSPERITY by Ha-Joon Chang. In this book,
Chang (a development Economist from South Korea elaborated this concept more.
He stated in page 11 of the book as follows:
“Today, Korea is one of the most ‘inventive’ nations
in the world- it ranks among the top five nations in terms of the number of
patents granted annually by the US Patent Office. But until the mid-1980s it
lived on ‘reverse engineering’. My friends would buy ‘copy’ computers that were
made by small workshops, which would take apart IBM machines, copy the parts,
and put them together. It was the same with trademarks. At the time, the
country was one of the ‘pirate capitals’ of the world, churning out fake Nike
shoes and Louis Vuitton bags in huge quantities. Those who had more delicate
consciences would settle for near-counterfeits. There were shoes that looked
like Nike but were called Nice, or shoes that had the Nike swoosh but with an
extra prong. Counterfeit goods were rarely sold as the genuine article. Those
who bought them were perfectly aware that they were buying fakes; the point was
to make a fashion statement, rather than to mislead. Copyrighted items were
treated in the same way. Today, Korea exports large and increasing quantity of
copyrighted materials (movies, TV soaps, popular songs), but at the time
imported music (LP records) or films (videos) were so expensive that few people
could afford the real thing. We grew up listening to pirate rock’ n’ roll
records, which we called ‘tempura shop records’, because their sound quality
was so bad it sounded as if someone was deep-frying in the background. As for
foreign books, they were still beyond the means of most students. Coming from a
well-off family that was willing to invest in education, I did have some
imported books. But most of my books in English were pirated. I could never
have entered and survived Cambridge without those illegal books.
This is really puzzling to me and I will rather
conclude this here. I prefer to make a comment myself and allow readers to make
their own comment or express their perception on the subject. This is because
Nigerian has a very similar situation with the past of South Korea but won’t
advance from the practice of piracy to being inventive of original products.
Olusola Akinyemi Esq.
President
Joseph Initiative Ltd/Gte
olusola.akins@gmail.com
08077726199
