Serendipity

While here, I am teaching a seminar course to our students regarding intellectual property and technology. We have explored many aspects of copyright law, how it has changed through the years, and how technology has generated many issues with the law. Among the activities we did in class were several mock trials of relevant American court cases. Of course, this topic has a great deal of relevance in China so I have tried to add some connections to China.

In BeiBei, an area frequented by the students (and us) is called the underground market. It is a basement of a building covering an entire city block. Inside is a maze of hundreds of little stalls selling anything and everything including lots of clothes, household items, paper, notebooks, pens, bedding, DVDs by the thousands, etc.

One day a couple of weeks ago, we wandered into an area of the underground market where we had not been before and found a series of stalls selling books, mostly used. Since the titles are all in Chinese characters, I had no hope of reading the titles, let alone the books themselves. But being a book lover, we still scanned the shelves until I found the only book that had an English title on its spine:

Connie immediately bought it for me for my birthday, but I am donating it to the "lending library" we are leaving behind for next year's group of students from CSB/SJU. (Jim)