“Chinese culture” is often deployed as an argument to shift political disagreement over topics like democracy or intellectual property (IP) “piracy” from grounding in assumed universal norms onto a cultural terrain wherein differences are to be expected. In terms of resistance to the global expansion of IP laws, this “cultural” argument appears on both sides: as a suggestion that the “ownership” of such intangible things simply does not make sense in Chinese culture and also as a sort of “Culture of Piracy” denunciation of Chinese people as incapable of innovation and only capable of copying. Not more than 20 years ago, both Taiwan and China were equally derided as “pirate” nations. While this moniker continues to follow China’s reputation as the “World’s Factory Floor,” Taiwan and its companies have not only tended to avoid it in the recent decade, but also increasingly advocate for stronger, rather than weaker, IP protection themselves. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the production of patents in Taiwan, this paper argues that Taiwan’s transformation is significantly better explained in terms of economic structures and accumulation of legal knowledge than in terms of reified ideas of “culture.” The talk then delves into this transformation — and the roles of structure and culture in it — based on anthropological fieldwork conducted primarily within one LED (light emitting diode) company that produces products between Taiwan and China and patents between Taiwan and the United States, and supplemented by interviews more broadly in Taiwan’s semiconductor and high technology patent industries.