Did you know the term ‘Yankee’ is thought to be derived from the Dutch name Janke, which means “little Jan” or “little John,” a nickname that can be traced back to the 1680s, when it was used as a slang term for pirates. Yes, you heard that right, the Americans were regarded by the Europeans as Pirates. At least that’s what Matt Mason, author of The Pirates Dilemma suggest.
Matt isn’t just an author of a book, but also the Executive Marketing Director of BitTorrent, so when he says something–I listen. Things like: [box icon=“chat”]
But the term really gained steam during the Industrial Revolution. Europeans began using the term to refer to all North Americans as a result of America’s national policies towards European intellectual property. America only industrialized as rapidly as it did by counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring global patents and stealing intellectual property wholesale. Lax enforcement of the intellectual property laws was the primary engine of the American economic miracle writes Doron S. Ben-Atar in Trade Secrets. The United States employed pirated know-how to industrialize. Europeans saw America as a nation of bootleggers, which was a little unfair, as every major European country was also heavily engaged in piracy and industrial espionage at some point in the 18th century. Piracy was, in fairness, the only way the U.S. could keep up.
Of course, fast forward a couple hundred years, and now you see US companies accusing other countries, particularly China and other Asian nations of doing the exact same thing the US did to try to bridge the economical and technological gap it had with Europe. One would argue that part of the China miracle, is their lax enforcement and ignorance (or arrogance) of patent laws, but in all fairness within this space of of gross patent apathy, there exist large pockets of innovation that would otherwise be impossible if intellectual property laws were strictly enforced and followed.Consider a very specific example of the ‘drop down’ menu in the iOS. When I bought the iPhone4 for my wife 2 years ago, the only way you could get the ‘fancy’ drop down menu that enable/disabled 3G and Wi-Fi was by jail-breaking your iPhone. Now it comes standard with iOS from Apple, so you could in theory argue that the worlds best design company got their que from the pirate market–but you never hear apple admitting to this.
