Property rights only protect property owners. Ideologies, like Communism, that frown on private property are often not all that interested in enforcing property rights. Developing nations often view intellectual property laws as a way for developed nations to keep poor countries poor.

Until developing nations start to have intellectual property of their own. Apparently Chinese foundries are deciding that maybe respecting intellectual property isn't such a bad idea after all. As Marlowe Hood observed in IEEE Spectrum, Chinese companies have even more to lose from rampant piracy than foreign companies do.

One of the Corante columnists has analyzed eight years of email statistics. He found that, even if you filter out all the spam and ruthlessly triage everything else, managing typical email volume can require 2.5 hours per day. No wonder it's so hard to get anything else done!

These statistics are also why I ask people to send press announcements to pressrelease@thinfilmmfg.com, and why I may not notice if your message gets caught in my spam filter. I routinely bounce a hundred spam messages a day, and receive up to a hundred press releases a week. Handling these items individually just isn't feasible.