IP protections give a company a monopoly on a product for a period of time. If the company uses that time to build an even better product, that’s great for the consumer. If the company uses it to gut their engineering department (who needs innovation anymore!) and enrich themselves, I am much less sympathetic.
The fact that our legal system can’t tell the difference between the two and the market doesn’t seem to care doesn’t mean we should pretend there isn’t a difference.
Come on, my good man: everybody really does it. Success in the 21st century needs you to account for the fact that it's a matter of if, not when your IP leaks to competitors.
Didn't Apple have to disable the oximeter on their smart watches because they copied Massimo? Or, what about the episode where Google sued Waymo cofounder Levandowski for stealing & transferring IP to Uber? Meanwhile, Uber had a thriving department devoted to corporate espionage?
Or Operation Paperclip that shipped the entire German propulsion hivemind to the US? Or CryptoAG that sold compromised comms. to essentially all the world?
Even if America closes off its markets to foreign firms found guilty of copying American IP, they'll simply lose the global market, while their market dominance shrinks further.
