Don't forget foreign actors constantly looking to steal designs. If government properly enforced IP laws and imposed sanctions on countries violating them then we wouldn't be in so much mess.
The US has software patents. The EU has GDPR. China has rampant IP theft. Russia has corruption. Every large market has peculiarities, it's the cost of doing business.
The US Trade Office publishes a literal naughty list of countries that aren't playing nice with its intellectual property laws. Full of language such as "stakeholders" too. Corporations literay use the might of the US government to police their imaginary property across the globe.
Don't underestimate these monopolists. My country regularly makes it to this list. I remember some MPAA asshole coming here to push his agenda being met by journalists asking him why this should be a priority in a country without universal basic sanitation. Now we have increasingly regular IP enforcement. One such operation made national news a few days ago.
Not a bad line of thought. We also have to solve the problem where you have e.g. China and corporations in China blatantly flouting any IP laws. If we did have a just IP regime (we don't) it would continue to be severely undercut by this problem. Somehow, if it's even possible, we need buy-in/treaties etc. from the major economies.
Are you suggesting that US companies should fear the US government may... steal their IP? I'm not being facetious, I just don't understand what the "realistic and regular worries" you cite are supposed to be.
Especially since a lot of early industrial nations basically gave no fucks about intellectual property rights enforcement but are now making developing countries play by a stricter set of rules.
That works when you're a rich and powerful country, but not so much when more powerful countries are willing to inflict economic sanctions on you for disrespecting the IP of their corporations.
What's missing is the culture of respecting other nations' IP, on both commercial level and individual level. Their laws on enforcing IP are practically unilateral in the context of intl. relations.
Yes, IP protectionism is a problem, and breaking IP sometimes is extremely beneficial (e.g. generic drugs). But that doesn't account for the underdevelopment of most countries. There are many factors involved -- geographical, historical, social, political and so on. Its a long discussion that is ill fitted to a comment box, but suffice to say B&M Gates isn't _the_ reason underdeveloped countries are that way.
One of the biggest issues with this stuff in Asia/China in particular is the attitude of governments toward IP there. The problem isn't just that there's a large population there, and that its another country. Maybe its naive of me, but I think if there was something that was blatantly stolen like this in Canada or the UK, I could go through the channels to have it taken down, and a case pursued against them fairly easily.
It's absolutely not a coincidence as IP theft is a primary demand of the US side at this time. The other being the overall imbalance.
Ironically, the bigger one is not arbitrary theft of IP, it's the requirement of many actors to willingly give up their IP when going into China and the de-facto closed market given all of the challenges foreign entities have to face.
Some arbitrary IP theft of XMen films and fashion labels could be tolerable, as could a permanent trade imbalance as America still wins huge surpluses even in an imbalanced exchange.
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