I weep for the Chinese researchers never getting funding and a moment in the sun, cause a incompetent secret service/insecure government prefers copying.
A secure system for sharing information is basically a door with a lock. You break the lock and steal something, you have broken the law.
Law enforcement at that scale is highly asymmetrical. Large powerful countries can act like bullies because "what are you gonna do about it?".
Yeah, we have the UN and international courts and what not, but those are toothless as without a superior power to act as the enforcer, they can wipe their ass with your laws, complaint or court ruling and do as they please anyway.
However none of that implies:
> There's nothing wrong with stealing and copying.
It signals a very scary zero-sum mentality of getting ahead at any cost. But like, it's the college student who cheats on every exam... yeah you're getting good grades. Yeah you eventually figured out how to copycat the stuff. What's that worth? Is the output enough?
I do appreciate a lot though the counter view in this thread that IP is a made up fiction, that it's artificial, and that we could probably be much greater a world if we had reward mechanisms to give other than complete & total control for 20+ years.