Lawfulness Attitudes and Willingness to Buy Product Counterfeiting

”…the East and the West developed such different habits of thought, because you had Aristotle and we had Confucius” (Nisbett 2003, p. 29).The different perspectives can be traced back 2,500 years to the influence of the Confucian tradition which believed that the highest form of accomplished performance was represented by students who faithfully reproduce their teachers'' work. In contrast Western students are never taught to copy and are encouraged to be independent and original. When Confucian influences were strong in societies, the Chinese avowed that the concept of replication was not a dishonorable act. As consequence, a cultural difference existed in morality and perspective between East and West in terms of Intellectual Property Rights. Asian nations traditionally believe the concept of copyright to reflect characteristic values of the Western World in general; and was created to maintain a monopoly over the distribution and production of knowledge and knowledge based products. As a result, when pressure is placed by foreign countries on Asian countries such as Indonesia to develop laws to counter trademark infringements, counterfeit products have not diminished.