Lets legalize theft because some get away with it.
In the 2nd scenarios above, you may have to work harder in your woodchopping business, as I'm now competition, but doesn't that mean that the villagers benefit from better access (cheaper prices) to wood-chopping services?
We currently define ideas as property. But is that ethically defensible? Now, if I claim to have originated the ax idea, I'm maybe stealing your brand or reputation. I should have to give credit to you for the idea of an ax, but I don't see how making a copy is theft. Ideas are not scarce; they're inherently shareable.
> you may have to work harder in your woodchopping business, as I'm now competition
So China copying our products is good, because we now have competition?
Regarding China, copying without attribution should be prosecuted as a form of reputational or brand fraud, as it fails to give credit to others for the idea. And sure, under existing intellectual property laws many Chinese firms ought to be prosecuted and held accountable---I don't advocate breaking existing laws.
I simply think that the laws out to be brought into better alignment with reality, and ideas simply aren't scarce (at least in how economics considers scarcity).
That is precisely the issue at hand.
> Ideas are fundamentally different
But that's essentially what products are. It's not like chinese companies take a product and clone it, they take the idea of how to make a product look like and work and implement it. Same applies to code, art, books. OpenAI takes those products, the results of ideas, modify them and resell them without attribution or without having paid a license. That's simply theft.
Is code an idea? Is the corpus of Github an idea?
It will be generally good for the world, for American manufacturing, workers, businesses, and families---pretty much for all except Wall Street banks and those close to the government money spigots.
That's precisely what malicious actors such as China have done. Not only are we swamped with lower quality products, but as you wrote, we are also facing significant social and economic issues. This time at an unprecedented scale.
Yes? Isn't that the entire point of the market driving innovation and improving things over time?
Let's try the opposite: Why is China copying foreign products bad? And to whom?
I’m aware you might think that their approach sucks too but we can’t have it both ways.
Same rules have to be applied across the board.