Because we are using GlobalMedia?, it has become possible to transfer work to foreign jurisdictions, often called offshoring. In practice, this really means to non-Western countries who have legal frameworks that are not in line with Western IntellectualProperty and SocialRecourse? ('our' preferred GlobalJurisdiction?).
Profit motives had off shored a lot of manufacturing to places like China over the past couple of decades, making China truly the manufacturer of the world. However, there has been an unexpected consequence of this. Unlike outsourcing within the West, where there is a willing PoliceForce to EnforceResponsibility so the business environment is a SafePlace? to transfer control of your resources to a third party, OffShore companies take your IntellectualProperty and use it to compete with you. That is, many manufacturers have discovered new competitors arising from China selling back their own products. They made 5000 for you, and 500 for themselves.
This policy has been an OpenProcess from the beginning. China has had an open policy of importing Western know how into the country through open economic borders, having foreign investors build up factories their and train the Chinese workforce. Canada has done the same thing for ever with the powerhouse United States, except we are heavily aligned with the American legal system.
The trouble is that China is not very much aligned and they are prudently taking a hard line to negotiate the terms of alignment, which they can do since they are very strong unlike Canada, and so they are less trustworthy as partners. Many companies have therefore done the prudent move of splitting their manufacturing process across many factories across many similarly cheap manufacturing countries (e.g. Taiwan, Phillipines). The trouble is that China has a trade embargo against Taiwan, so often people have to ship parts back to America and then ship them back to Taiwan to be assembled.
India, on the other hand, is moving towards alignment into the Western economic legal system, as are new members of the EU. The difficulty for any business leader or even system designer is how to evaluate jurisdictions to OffShore to, especially since most of us don't even realize how well developed and intricate our own Modern society has become (e.g. libertarians).
The Internet makes these jurisdictional problems more real for us designers. Consider doing business with http://mp3search.ru, which at one time was offering legal (in Russia) downloads of MP3's for 0ドル.10USD a track. While at one point PayPal offered their services, they reneged the contract under legal pressure from the RIAA, since PayPal is based in the U.S. and is vulnerable to prosecution. Conversely, as a customer, you now have to decide to give your credit card to a (albeit reputable) Russian credit card company (currently over an unsecured connection).
Further, if you use a server in a different country, your data is subject to that country's laws or lack thereof. Off shoring or out sourcing your customer's credit card information to an untrustworthy host makes you liable for potential damages. Also, consider that many people are also considering pulling their web hosting services out of the United States due to the PatriotAct?, so concern is not always about non-capitalist countries.
Finally, this practice actually underscores the value of IntellectualProperty. Without that law, it would be impossible to create a specialized economy since each company would be forced to keep control and ownership over its entire production line since it would have no other way of protecting its competitive advantage. Bear in mind, in the automotive industry, the big companies often own all the machines on the production line of even their third party suppliers in order to keep their suppliers from supplying to their competitors.