> Do that. Then come back and tell me how it feels to have some fucker in China clone your product.
I'm sure that would hurt, but also am deeply convinced that the tendency to overprice ideas/products just because the western economics says it's the right thing when there's still demand, is what creates opportunities for cloners. Ask yourself why we don't see people around photocopying physical newspapers to sell them at half the price and you get the answer to why other products are cloned.
Go build a company and have your products stolen. Then you'll understand.
Go build a product in a competitive market and then have someone with zero business experience it's overpriced.
Here, I'll help you. You don't even need to make physical products:
Create a website that will host authoritative articles about, I don't know, auto repairs.
You will personally write all the articles.
You devote a whole year to researching and writing them. You also hire a graphic artist to create illustrations for every single article. Let's say each article takes an hour of your time (if you are really good at it) and half an hour of the artist time. In the aggregate each article cost you about $200 to produce, in time and hard costs.
At the end of twelve months you publish your website with 1,000 fresh articles that cost you no less than $200K to produce. You devoted a whole year to this, so one could very well argue there's an opportunity cost associated with the success or failure of this website. I'll place that at $100K. You invested $300K to launch this site. And then someone comes along and tells you it's overpriced.
That aside, as soon as you launch I hire a bunch of people on Fiverr to take your articles and modify them just enough to maintain the value of your research yet look and feel a little different. I pay $10 per article to steal and change your product. I invest a total of $10,000 and can probably get the work done inside of a month.
I now launch a new website to compete with yours. I can spend a few tens of thousands of dollars in marketing and outrank you with what effectively is your own content. I stole a year of your hard work and investment and made your website irrelevant by throwing money at marketing. Money you don't have because you spent it all researching and developing your product.
That is, in many ways, what is happening with the cloning of products out of China. There's nothing whatsoever good about it no matter how hard someone might want to try and distort reality to put lipstick on that pig.
Please don't get lost in the weeds and see the hypothetical for what it is: A mechanism through which one can gain understanding of the issue being discussed.
I'm sure that would hurt, but also am deeply convinced that the tendency to overprice ideas/products just because the western economics says it's the right thing when there's still demand, is what creates opportunities for cloners. Ask yourself why we don't see people around photocopying physical newspapers to sell them at half the price and you get the answer to why other products are cloned.