The Pirate Book

players like Seeed Studio or Cubietech have understood it completely. This new generation of Chinese makers is gathering a large community of tech followers, with all the best practices from documentation, community care and promotion. You can freely check the quality of their designs and have nice and enjoyable tours in their factories in Shenzhen. Far from the grim world of pirates, they publish methodologies and plans online, support their users, and will even make your crowd funding campaign a success if you ask them. They know that products aren’t born in the mind of a designer, but in the hands of a factory worker.

For decades, foreign companies went to China and left with what they paid for: very cheap stuff that barely works. Indeed, you cannot expect an illiterate farmer to produce a Swiss watch on day one. After years of underground experience at the margins of the global production system, Shanzhai manufacturers have come up with a new model of production that may influence generations of designers to come. Copying, counterfeiting, and reusing existing inventions has contributed not to the destruction of pre-existing industry, but to its optimization. Mostly, it has covered the costs of training thousands of Chinese manufacturers while creating a highly profitable local economy. Instead of contesting an existing model, the transformation of Shanzhai manufacturing into an open-source model for mass production may even reinforce the current craze for efficiency in technological development. If free access to copyrighted resources proves to be harmful in the long run, it won’t be because of losses due to counterfeiting but from the application of so much knowledge, resources, and skills to the wrong purposes.